November 11, 2016

Ukrainian Canadian labor minister seeks to improve workplace safety in Ukraine

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MaryAnn Mihychuk, Canada’s minister of employment, workforce development and labor.

Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

OTTAWA – In the days leading up to her first anniversary as Canada’s minister of employment, workforce development and labour, MaryAnn Mihychuk had the chance to use her pre-political professional skills in a visit to her ancestral homeland.

Ms. Mihychuk, who serves as the Liberal Member of Parliament for the north Winnipeg federal riding of Kildonan-St. Paul in the House of Commons, was in Ukraine during the first week of November to strengthen collaboration between Canada and Ukraine on workplace safety in the context of the bilateral trade agreement signed in Kyiv in July.

She also met with representatives of the International Labor Organization – the only tripartite United Nations agency that brings together governments, employers and workers to develop and set labor standards and policies – to create a training plan involving Ukraine, Canada and the ILO with the goal of improving the safety surrounding working conditions in Ukraine’s extractive sector.

Ms. Mihychuk, a geoscientist for 20 years before entering politics in her home province of Manitoba in 1995, said in an interview that according to Ukrainian government statistics, 26 percent of Ukrainian workers faced hazardous conditions on the job in 2015.

“In particular, the extractive mineral industry was the most hazardous industrial sector,” said the minister, who holds a master’s degree in geology from Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

The three-party, workplace-safety strategy is also supported by a chapter on labor in the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA). It requires that both countries’ labor laws and practices adhere to ILO principles and rights, including the prevention of occupational injuries and illnesses, and offer compensation in such cases.

CUFTA’s labor provisions mark the first time Canada has incorporated a “progressive” and comprehensive chapter in a free-trade agreement that addresses such issues as eliminating all forms of forced labor and banning child labor, said Ms. Mihychuk, who previously served as Manitoba’s minister of industry, trade and mines. CUFTA’s Chapter 13 on labor also gives workers the rights to join unions and collective bargaining; prohibits employment discrimination; and sets out minimum employment standards, such as minimum wages and overtime pay for wage earners, even if they are not covered by collective agreements.

Similar labor protections are also part of the free-trade deal Canada signed with the European Union late last month.

Coincidentally, while Minister Mihychuk was preparing to leave Ukraine and head home on November 3, her Cabinet colleague and fellow Ukrainian Canadian, International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland was in Ottawa to introduce legislation in the House to implement CUFTA.

Minister Freeland and her Ukrainian counterpart, Economic Development and Trade Minister Stepan Kubiv, signed the agreement in July during Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first official visit to Ukraine. Once CUFTA receives parliamentary ratification in Canada and Ukraine and comes into force, the agreement will eliminate Canadian duties on almost all (99.9 percent) Ukrainian imports. It will also remove duties on about 86 percent of Canadian exports to Ukraine, with the remaining tariff concessions to be implemented over a period of up to seven years.

Given her ministerial portfolio, Ms. Mihychuk’s focus flowing from CUFTA concerns labor and workplace safety, and the latter’s importance was amplified when she visited the former Chornobyl power plant, where one reactor was destroyed and another experienced a partial meltdown in 1986, resulting in the worst nuclear disaster in history.

Canada has contributed $3.6 million ($2.7 million U.S.) toward a replacement sarcophagus at the site to help contain and safely store radioactive materials resulting from the catastrophic accident.

Canada is contributing as a member of the international Chornobyl Shelter Fund that is supporting the construction of a safe confinement structure intended to prevent the reactor complex from leaking radioactive material into the environment It will replace the existing concrete-and-steel sarcophagus put in place over the destroyed reactor to contain radioactive contamination.

“It was the worst workplace accident that ever happened, and the consequences were enormous,” said Ms. Mihychuk.

Several hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to high levels of radiation and an estimated 350,000 Ukrainians had to leave their homes in contaminated areas following the Chornobyl calamity. In 1986 alone, 28 emergency workers died due to acute radiation syndrome, according to the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Since then, there have been estimates that as many as 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chornobyl accident.

But Ms. Mihychuk said she saw signs that the area around the site is recovering from the nuclear disaster through an ecosystem regeneration in which plants and wildlife have “robustly” returned.

She’s also hopeful Ukraine will soon be energy-independent and not have to rely on natural gas imports originating from Russia.

That goal comes with challenges, however.

Ukraine has a lot of coal, but some mines are located in the conflict zone in the eastern part of the country where pro-Russian separatists have battled Ukrainian government troops.

In terms of workplace safety, coal mines are also extremely dangerous. Last year, an explosion at one in eastern Ukraine killed 33 miners.

Furthermore, coal is considered the dirtiest form of energy. Mining coal produces methane, and burning it releases carbon dioxide, both of which scientists say constitute the greatest contribution to climate change and global warming.

But Ukrainians need “cheap and reliable fuel,” and “coal is under their feet,” said Ms. Mihychuk.

But she added that, as abundant as coal is in Ukraine, it could only be a temporary supply for Ukraine’s energy needs, particularly in light of the Paris climate-change accord that came into force on November 4. Both Canada and Ukraine have ratified the global agreement that seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated in large part by coal.

In light of that, Canada could help Ukraine move toward a greener economy and “embrace the principles of climate change,” according to Minister Mihychuk.

“Canadian companies are looking for opportunities to do some drilling in Ukraine to look for natural gas, which is much cleaner than coal,” she said. “Ukraine could then be economically self-sufficient – and green.”

Ms. Mihychuk is also exploring the possibility of helping Ukraine’s health system through an initiative under way in her home riding. Winnipeg’s Seven Oaks General Hospital is home to the Wellness Institute – a world-class facility that promotes healthy living and the Ukrainian Canadian Minister would like it to be used as a model to develop a similar center in Ukraine.

She raised the idea with Ukraine’s acting Minister of Health Dr. Ulana Suprun, a Detroit-born radiologist from Manhattan. She and her Canadian husband, Marko, were on the Maidan during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and became actively involved in providing medical and humanitarian aid to the injured. They ended up staying in Ukraine.

Marko Suprun is also a native Winnipegger and, in a serendipitous encounter, he ran into Ms. Mihychuk during her recent visit to Ukraine.

“On the first night in Kyiv, I was having dinner in a restaurant, and there comes a guy from around the corner who turns out to be this North End Winnipeg guy who’s married to Ukraine’s health minister and whose parents used the services at the Seven Oaks’ Wellness Center,” said Minister Mihychuk.

It was one of those six-degrees-of-separation moments to which Ms. Mihychuk has grown accustomed.

During her first trip to Ukraine, with her mother in 2004, Ms. Mihychuk spent time in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, where she has strong family roots. While there, she discovered that some of the Ukrainians from the area brought with them a direct reminder of their homeland when they immigrated to Manitoba.

There is a community in southeastern Manitoba called Senkiw, which is tiny enough that if you blink while driving by it you might miss it. But Ms. Mihychuk knows of it – her maternal grandmother lived there and she herself was born 61 years ago about 37 miles away in Vita, which isn’t exactly a metropolis with a population of 400 or so residents.

However, Ms. Mihychuk did not know that there is also a Ukrainian village named Senkiv (the name is the same, but the transliteration is different), until she explored the Ivano-Frankivsk region on her initial visit to Ukraine.

It’s a small but significant Ukraine-Manitoba connection for Ms. Mihychuk, who is passionate about a project that will illustrate even greater ties.

Less than three years from now will mark the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.

The massive labor disruption, which lasted six weeks, involved more than 30,000 people, shut down Canada’s then third-largest city and culminated on June 21, 1919, a day known as Bloody Saturday.

Two central characters in what remains as Canada’s best-known general strikes were men of Ukrainian origin: Mike Sokolowski, who allegedly threw a brick at police during a violent clash and died instantly after being shot through the heart; and Harry Damaschuk, who played a role in events leading up to that Bloody Saturday demonstration.

Ukrainian Manitoban director Danny Schur highlighted, in a hybrid manner, the role both men played in that ugly chapter in Canadian history. Mr. Sokolowski’s name is used for Mr. Damaschuk’s character in Mr. Schur’s well-known stage musical “Strike!,” which is being adapted for film. Shooting was scheduled to begin this summer in Winnipeg, but has been delayed until next summer.

Canada’s labor minister also wants to memorialize that historic event in downtown Winnipeg, and plans to work with members of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and Manitoba’s labor movement to create a bronze monument in the form of an overturned streetcar, an iconic image from the 1919 strike.

Said Ms. Mihychuk: “We want it to be a structure where people can see how the labor movement changed history, not only in Winnipeg but in the world, and how Ukrainians made a positive change for workers.”

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