Tranquille Occupation

Gary Steeves (BC Government Employees Union staff) [00:00:00] It was middle, mid-July… Was like a week, 10 days later. On July the 8th, in this massive assault Grace McCarthy had, had announced and issued a press release saying that Tranquille was going to close. So we knew that the government planned to close it and because the government closed other institutions at Dellview and Skeenaview and there was a lot of social pressure to de-institutionalize. So I wasn’t surprised by that. They called my office. The Ministry of Human Resources – and they were down on just off West 12th. Just down past the hospital, MHR had an office building and said you know. “We need to speak to you about this press release and what our plans are.” So we thought it was, you know, a five year plan, now we’re going to close and (mutters). So Jack just said “Gary, you deal with the ministry. You go, you’ll know what you’re talking about.” I get down there and they have the senior managers and the most senior human relations people, and there’s a gang of like six of them sitting there, and there’s me.

 [00:01:14] And so I joked, “I thought you guys were senior? What are you doing? What are you guys doing here working in the middle of July? Like you know, I thought you were senior. I’m junior. That’s why I’m here.” And so they, they, we sat, got to work and they said, look. They laid out this thing about how Tranquille was falling apart and needing a huge capital investment. They didn’t use that word. But they need a lot of money to fix it. And they weren’t going to and they were going to close it. I said “Oh yeah, and when is this going to happen?| They said “Well, it’s going to happen by the end of this year.”

 [00:01:54] So I got back to the office and called Cliff and called Jack. I sat down with him said, “You can’t believe it. Here’s what they’re gonna do.”

 [00:02:05] And Jack said, “Well, you’ve got to go to Kamloops. Get on the plane right now.” And this meeting was 2 o’clock in the afternoon, I’d probably be back in the office by 4:00. I jumped on a plane at six o’clock and flew to Kamloops.

 [00:02:23] I told them what I’d learned and Dave McPherson is a superb organizer.

 [00:02:29] I mean Dave McPherson was just a, the creme de la creme of an organizer.

 [00:02:36] So he said, “What does Jack say?” Cause Jack Adams, you know, in our union Jack was a superb tactician and strategist. He was brilliant at knowing where the buttons were and knowing if you did this, what they were gonna do. And he had the counter moves. You know, he was always two steps ahead of everybody, in my experience.

 [00:02:55] I, I enjoyed working with him. And he, he said, “You know you just can’t go into Kamloops, and drop this bombshell on those 600 workers and then get on the plane and leave town.” “Oh OK. Well what are we gonna do?” says Gary Steeves. You know. Four years on staff with the BCGEU. He said, “I think you got to have them just sit down and stay right there. No one goes back to work. You just sit right down, right there, sit in.”

 [00:03:30] So, I just told them what happened. I just went through blow by blow the meeting and what they said and what was planned.

 [00:03:38] And then I said “Do you have questions? Let’s us, before we talk further, what questions do you have? Let’s get them out on the table.” So people ask questions like, well, is this going to be for everyone? But the biggest question that everyone asked and was asked over, and over, and over again was well what’s going to happen to these people we look after? But like, they were like teachers, they cared more about the kids than they cared about themselves. You know, they, they just said this is not right. So I said, “Look, I have a question” and they, we answered all the questions as best we could. And I said, “I have a question for you guys. What do you want to do? You have choices. You can do nothing. Or you can fight back. And if you want to fight back, I got some ideas.”

 [00:04:27] This guy stood up at the railing, way at the back of the meeting. He stood up and he said, “We don’t have any choices here. Like, you don’t give me that. We know we don’t have any choices here. We’re not going to take this.” And sat down.

 [00:04:48] And it was like… I don’t know. It was like, it was like it was all choreographed, you know. As he sat down, everyone else just stood up and it was just this massive, you know, clapping and cheering and yeah, we’re gonna do something. And so then Dave and I explained, “Well, look. We’re going to do it. Let’s go. So occupy the place, let’s get rid of the bosses. Well first off, we’ll kick the bosses out, we’ll send a little message to Bill Bennett that his world’s changed. So they loved that. And then a whole shop steward started scheduling. You would work a shift, sleep in a shift in your workplace, and you would, and you go home for a shift. But boy, the workers, they just handled it all. There was schedules in every department within an hour, and then we called the bosses and said, “You will not be allowed into work tomorrow”. We had sentries on every door. And even people were delivering stuff, you know, food companies or whoever doing deliveries. If you didn’t have a union card, you couldn’t get on the property, and pretty soon all these companies are saying, “Well, we contracted over to here because they’re union.”

 [00:05:56] We thought, “This is great”. But it worked very well. The other thing we did was we elected a council and it had one or two representatives from every shift in every department and this council, this occupation council made all the base all the big decisions. So it was good.

 [00:06:19] So every day, we let the managers come in on the back end of the property, and Tranquille is a huge property, and they had cottages. In the old days when it was a sanitorium, they built cottages for the doctors, this would be the fif- 1950s. And they, so these, there’s a couple of cottages left and they have nothing in them. No furniture and just bare little cottages. So, we had all of the managers sit in one cottage, so we’d let them go there and they couldn’t go anywhere else. So I would take over in the morning a big folder of everything for them to sign and then secretaries would ship it into Victoria. Oh, and they were just, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” I said, “You’re going to sign that or it’s gonna get a lot, it’s gonna get a whole lot worse around here.” “…Okay.”

 [00:07:13] It lasted until August 10th. August 10th was the Empire Stadium rally. Well, it ended for a number of reasons. One is that we got as much public relate, to be crass about it, we’d gotten in and you know, the maximum amount of public relations Operation Solidarity fightback propaganda out of it that we could. The workers were getting tired. You know, you can only do that for so long and people need to get back to their normal lives. So workers were getting tired and you could tell from the, the occupation council was, they were tired. And we had an agreement from the government that if we gave it back to them there’d be no retaliation and there’d be no… So the government was really on their knees begging, basically. Like, you know, can’t we get, can we get back into normal business?

 [00:08:15] And we had an agreement that the fate of Bill Three and Bill Two were going were going to be dealt with, you know, through the, through the collective bargaining and strikes that were going to take place in the fall. You know, that, that roster of, you know, BCGEU goes first and you remember all of that. So the the line up of unions prepared to walk out to force the government off its legislative agenda. We weren’t going to make, continuing the occupation wasn’t going to make that come any faster, and it seemed an appropriate time to let the workers have a rest. Before some more emotional events would take place in the fall when we take the strike vote and go out and everything. And it just seemed like the right time.