 Well, I was born into a union family. My father, Wilfred Gerard, was a volunteer organizer for the Mine Millist Metalworkers Union, and he got very, very active in the union in the 50s and 60s, and part of my youth was spent following my dad around to union meetings and going to union halls, and while they'd be in a meeting, I'd be hanging out and doing something so that I got to understand the importance of the labor movement really early. And remember in one of the strikes with INCO in the 50s that my dad helped raise funds and they called it the Scrounges Committee, get donations so that families could make it through a very difficult strike with INCO. And then I went to work in the smelter in 1965 at INCO, and for the first couple of years I wasn't very active in the union, but I saw that things hadn't changed much, so I got to be active in what was then local 6500 of the United Steelworkers and got active in the local and got to be chairman of the grievance committee for what they called the reduction side, which was the smelter and the mills, the refineries. And then from there I got hired by the union in 1977 and worked for the Steelworkers union in Toronto for a while, then Hamilton for a while, and then Elliott Lake for a while, and then got elected district director for Ontario. So it was starting from my early teen years until I got elected director, my pretty much big part of my life was based on the values I learned from my father, whose picture is right there over my shoulder all the time. Keeping an eye, you had mentioned the first few years you started officially working was in a smelter for INCO. What you had also mentioned, nothing had changed or not much had changed since you'd follow your father working for the union, so what hadn't changed, what were the issues you were seeing? Well, INCO was very, in those days, in the 50s and 60s, INCO was a sort of very autocratic place. Much of the time the president and CEO of INCO was from the American military. They ran it almost like a military operation and we needed to have a strong union in the workplaces to defend the membership and advance our interests. And so in the department I managed to get myself transferred from what they call then the converter aisle. I worked in the converters which is a complicated process of extracting the minerals through a furnace and all that jazz. I got myself demoted to the transportation department as a yard laborer so I could go to school at night at Laurentian University and when I got myself demoted to yard laborer there was no steward, no representation in the department and I always carried the contract book in my pocket so that if I had to defend myself I knew it was there and some of the folks in the transportation department was where I got myself demoted to. Wanted someone to represent them and they signed a petition asking me if I would represent them and I hesitated a while because I wanted to go to school but then I decided that I had to do that because of my father's values and so I became a shop steward and then from there I became chief steward of the reduction section and from there a staff rep and then from there a regional director. And were there when you started off were there specific goals you had in mind, specific things to change or fix? Yeah, we wanted our folks to be treated like human beings. I mean if you were in a, for example if you were on the track gang they loaded you into the back of a five ton truck and took you up on the slide dump and dumped you off in the middle of the winter and you had to keep warm by trying to start a fire in one of the shacks and if you got into the, in those days, if you went into the shack a little too early or a little too often there was some boss up there that was going to discipline you while you're up there with a 40 and 50 mile an hour wind and 30 below weather and so that kind of crap we weren't going to put up with. So those kinds of things I mean and they didn't respond all that well to me in the company to me being a steward they tried to ostracize me a couple of times in the summer they actually sent me out on a road raking stones off the road it was kind of a little chess game so and then I hung in and we actually made a difference made some changes. And before jumping further into your career what did you take at Laurentian? I went for a while and studied economics and political science I didn't get to finish because I got transferred I got hired by the union really and there you go. And why economics and political history? Political science. Because I was interested in it in fact at one time I wanted to be a I really wanted to be a teacher and I thought a lot of the a lot of the stuff that they taught you in the textbooks at at the University about economics were about three steps from reality and it may look good in a textbook but it doesn't quite apply in reality in fact I remember one time in one of the classes some banker guy was talking about budgeting and he wasn't making a lot of sense and I felt I should intervene and I told them that my dad worked in the mine and raised five kids and my mom was a stay-at-home mom and if he really wanted to learn about budgeting he should call my mom she could tell you how to budget you got five kids to raise and a husband on a one person income and in those days you didn't make a lot of money so that was kind of fun. And so from there you took which job? I was a I was asked to be I didn't quite go from there became chief steward of the reduction section and then I got involved in the internal union politics also supporting our sub director Gibb Yiltrist and he lost the election but he he recommended me to the then president and secretary treasurer Lloyd McBride and Lynn Williams and they asked me to go on the staff in 1977 so I went on the staff of the union and the job that was available was in Toronto I'd never been to Toronto on my own from Sudbury and so I said to the director at time Stuart Cook I said I would really be interested in the job and he talked about going to Southern Ontario I said I'd be okay I thought Southern Ontario Kingston London Kitchener so I said I'd be okay but I said look at I need time to get out of my courses because I'm taking course at Laurentian as a mature student and I can't afford a failure on my my transcript so I need to give them advance notice and all that stuff and he said fine and then he would go and see if he'd get permission to hire me and a couple of weeks later I got a phone call back from his assistant Ken Levac who said Stu got permission to hire you and you're to report to the Toronto office on Monday morning I said Toronto office he said yeah I said Stu said I was gonna go to Southern Ontario Ken he said where the hell do you think Toronto is kid you're gonna make it or not I said well I'll be there but I need some time to get out of my classes at the University so I don't end up with a F on my record he said well you have that opportunity when you go back you make arrangements with them can you make it to Toronto on Monday I said yeah I'll be there I don't want to indict General Motors but we my wife and I had a Chevy Vega you're too young to even know what that is and I drove it to Toronto got some assignments and one night I'm driving back from membership meeting in the back rear wheel fell off the goddamn car so here I'm in Toronto been there for a week don't know where I'm going and have a Chevy Vega and the wheel fell off it so that was my my start to being a Union rep in Toronto okay and throughout your your early career is there I mean speaking of the wheel falling off is there a specific job or something you worked on that just pops of mine as being dysfunctional no that it's instead of being dysfunctional we were trying to create something and the the National Director of the Unit of Time a person my name is Gerard Duckey he he wanted to to build a much broader education program to train and develop leadership in amongst the rank and file membership and it was called Back to the Locals so we would build a training program I don't know that most people haven't read the book it's pedagogy of the oppressed by a guy named Pablo Ferrari who wrote a book about how was he gonna train peasants in his country so that they would know what their rights are so what he did was he trained people to be trainers and those trainers went out and train trainers and they went out and train trainers so they created a network and that was the then National Director's vision and I really was excited about that in fact I had been chair of the Education Committee and back in my home local so I worked with him and the head of the Education Department in the National Office to institutionalize the Back to the Locals training program and I spent pretty much all of my career as a staff rep rather I was in Toronto Hamilton or Elliott Lake building that Back to the Locals education training program so for me that was a very very important part of the transformation of the Union of building creating and building an opportunity for members to get knowledge but how to work within the Union and advance their own interests and build structure for broader participation so rather than fixing something dysfunctional we built something from scratch which was much more exciting and it still goes on I mean that's you know take it from 1980 to now that's it's a long time and that program is being and we do a lot of that now here in the headquarters when I'm president doing lots of that outreach to give the rank and file membership more participation in the Union and how did you get from working in Canada to the United Steelworkers headquarters well it's it's a it's a story of in some ways being in the right place at the right time I was a by all standards a young steelworker staff representative I was 37 or 38 years old and we were dissatisfied with the district director that we had at the time and so we put together a committee that would choose someone to run against them which was which district six Ontario and it was the largest by membership district in in the Union in those days at a hundred thousand members just in that district a little over a hundred thousand and so I promoted and actively advanced the leadership of a person a person named Morris Keck we called him oh Keck Morris and he was he was sort of the consensus person of the committee to choose a candidate for a director and Moe had a heart attack when Moe had a heart attack a lot of people got nervous about what if he had a heart attack during the campaign what most people don't know is we're the only Union that has a one person one vote for every member in the same 24-hour period so you get elected by the rank and file they all have an opportunity to vote do they all vote not all but usually the overwhelming majority so people got nervous about what would happen if Moe had a heart attack during the campaign and so there was a reevaluation and there were a committee meeting to choose a new candidate and I got chosen as I say it's luck and being in the right place the right time I was the youngest person by age on the staff and I'd only been on the staff about eight years so I was pretty pretty young and that led to me becoming the district director of the largest district in the Union and so we worked hard at expanding the rank and file participation programs we worked hard at looking at doing things differently we did a employee buyout of Algoma Steel we bargain the first index private sector pensions in North America Algoma Steel that we did an employee buyout was the largest employee owned operation in North America so we did a lot of innovative things we created the first women's committee because the union was male dominated organization because of steel mining smelting all that kind of stuff so we created a women's committee called women of steel we expanded the back to the local training program we trained more instructors we put together an anti-racism program and went and got employers to pay to teach their own employees by our members we expand our health and safety campaigns we did all those things and then in the late 80s and early 90s the president of the steel workers at the time was Lynn Williams and other Canadian and in fact one of my heroes and my mentors Lynn was getting ready to retire from the union and he wanted wanted me to come to the United States as secretary treasurer of the union I initially said no I by this time I was national director by the way at 91 I became national director when Gerard Dacier retired for health reasons I became the national director and I'd only had the job for a little over a year and my sense was there had been a lot of change in the union I went from being district director to national director Gerard Dacier left Len Stevens who had been the Western director he had a stroke and was not able to function so we had to get a new Western Canada director our district director in Quebec was new because when Gerard Dacier retired so did the Quebec director so we had and if I was gonna leave we needed to get a new director in Canada I thought there was way too much change going on at the same time and we needed some stability in the union and Lynn in fact said look at the unions under attack in the US and if the labor movement dies in the US not gonna be good for Canadian labor and he he convinced me that I should come to Pittsburgh so I came to Pittsburgh as the secretary treasurer and I worked with the then president of our union George Becker and we became good friends and George ended up also leaving early before the end of his second term with prostate cancer so in some ways I've advanced as I said through combination of luck and being there at the at the right time but also I mean quite proud of the staff we built and the work we did and when when the International Executive Board got to a point a replacement to finish George's term I was really proud that I was the unanimous choice and again I was relatively young for that job when I first got it my hair was all dark so that's sort of a Cole's notes version of 30 plus years and you're also the you had mentioned Lynn Lynn Williams the only other Canadian to make to become president of not only that Lynn and I are the only two Canadians become president of any international union okay yeah okay and so you're now as president you're known for having brought in hundreds of thousands of workers into the union throughout your terms as president so initially what was your goal and and how'd you go about doing that how'd you go about increasing that number drastically well I think that the goal has to be kept really simple as one of my friends said workers join union so that they can improve their lives that's it simple as that so once you accept that that workers join unions they want to improve their lives then you look at what things can you and should you and must you do to improve their lives and it's such a it's such a heavy lift that if you're so arrogant as you think you can do it by yourself you'll fail and and and in the lay room we got to say we and not I and so you got to build a broad base of participation which will convert itself to a broad base of support then you've got to put meaningful ideas in front of them and see if they'll support them and advance them and that's that's something that that we've been good at in our union is broadening that base broadening an opportunity for participation and so that when you're out either looking at bringing in other unions into merge into your union or you're going out to organize new workers when they look at you they got to look at you and say yeah that would help and then make their decision if they look at you and say that's a bunch of fat white bureaucrats why would I want to be part of that and so the challenge for a union like ours right now is a very difficult one with shrinking manufacturing and mining base in US and Canada the opportunity for hiring to our employers is diminished and if we're a union that doesn't hire we represent so if we have a mine take my hometown of Sudbury if we have 3200 members in local 6500 and 200 leave in retirement and Valley doesn't hire anybody else we've lost 200 members but that's not our fault and so when we're going to try to grow and broaden the base of the union one of the things we got to be cognizant of is our best chance is if we're a reflection of the society we're in now because our employers do the hiring and through that we get membership we have an obligation then to push our employers to look and sound like the society that they're in so we need more women we need more people of color in Canada obviously we got it I mean in Canada I think it's an embarrassment the way we treated Aboriginal First Nations people and so right now our union and that was really proud of it when I was director we negotiated collective agreements where we included First Nations people and we included in those collective agreements recognition of First Nations people's rights whether they needed to be off their fishing and hunting times for their families how do they get training opportunities we did all those things then and I think it's imperative on us in both Canada and the United States that we attempt to have our movement look like and sound like a reflection of our society which means in our case we get to have push our employers to do that which was one of the things I was really proud of when our union did the anti-racism training right across the country and made thousands of our members take that training but paid by their employer so those things are really important and if you're gonna survive in the long run and be credible in the long run that's what we need to do when we merged with a number of unions they on a number of occasions with the large mergers the rubber workers and the paper and allied workers they talked about should we change our name and my answer was no and the reason we shouldn't change our name is our name has a history and it has credibility in Canada whether it's in Ontario Bridge Columbia or Newfoundland the same thing in the US we have a credibility with our name so that our name just our name alone opens doors so if we put the right people in the right positions those door openings can provide opportunity for making a better world in a safer place for our members reputation reputation and what's the total count now what's the membership 850,000 and if we if we do active and retired because we insist that we can still represent retired workers with in particular their healthcare in the US with pensions in Canada all of those things 1.2 million is the number we we talked about now it's not a true number to be blunt and to be honest about it because at any one time about 10% of our membership is not working whether they're on layoff whether they're on sickness and accident whether they're on vacation so and and the retiree numbers our best our best hope to get accurate numbers to get them from our employers how many retirees are left at valet how many retires are left at whatever the facility is in Canada you know do you take for example the what's going on right now in Canada with us deal trying to liquidate what used to be stelco we got 20,000 retirees there we have an obligation to speak up for them and to fight for them all this company is trying to deny them their pension benefits that were promised and then to be a little bit political those promises were made to Stephen Harper and Stephen Harper never held them accountable to meet those promises so I'm really damn glad he's gone you probably edit that out but it feels good saying it I've also say what say what you'd like I've also interviewed someone who had mentioned a very similar thing happening with Miranda yeah and they were also promised yeah and got pretty much none of that one yeah the the Bronfman's own Miranda they took good care of the Bronfman's so so correct me if I'm wrong here but the United the international United Steelworkers it's the largest industrial union in North America mm-hmm and it now encompasses it's the dominant union really in paper forestry products steel aluminum rubber glass chemicals and petroleum anything else I missed mining in Canada mining in Canada we're not the we're not the biggest mining union in the US we're nip and tuck with the miners union but with the largest mining union in Canada and to us that's really important it's it's pretty interesting that for a period of time until just the end of December I and all of our Canadian directors that come from the mining industry in in December we had one of our district directors that went to work for the Solidarity Center or Solidarity Fund I should say in Quebec and the person that took his place I think came out of an industrial facility not a mine but so it's a reflection that being a union rep in the mining industry is a good training ground because most of them are bastards and you had mentioned a few times it started a committee and a project called women of steel mm-hmm and could you talk a bit about how the presence and the role of women has potentially changed from when you started work sure when I became the when I became the Ontario director district 6 director we didn't have a functioning women's committee and like I said the hiring goes on the hiring is done by our employers so our membership is a reflection of who the employer hired and so if we were going to advance women's rights within our existing facilities and push for more hiring of women we need to have some kind of structure so we need to create a women's committee and at that time the Ontario women's directorate which was a spin an arm of the Ontario Ministry of Labor was giving grants for training and with Steven Lewis's help we put together a grant proposal for a grant to do some training for women in the Sea Workers Union and we developed something called the women's leadership course and we invited our local unions to identify women that would be able to attend the women's leadership development course and we probably had 30 or 40 that were recommended and we did some training and we were using the same philosophy there as we were doing in the back to the locals program how could we train women that could go out and train other women who could go and train other women and so after a couple of meetings of the women's leadership development program women at the time told me they didn't like the name women of steel no women's leadership development program and I said well I don't care you know why don't you guys pick a name so they said okay give us some time so I left the room they were meeting in our district office at the time I came back after they called me back and I can't remember now if it's 20 minutes or an hour I don't remember but they came back and said we've got our name now and I said what's the name they said the women of steel committee I said wonderful and then yeah and that's the name they picked and so I asked them why they picked that and they said a because they came from the Steelworkers Union all of them but also you had to have a steely back to be a woman in these workplaces and so they were women of steel and it made the point and so that was the district program I then talked about at a board meeting Lynn Williams who was the president at the time said this is terrific we should build a program like that and we passed some resolutions at the International Convention to build programs and I just now have totally lost track how many resolutions over the years we've passed to get where we are we will have an international women's conference in March there'll probably be somewhere between 1500 women that will be here it will be the largest single gathering of working-class women in North America yeah and so that's a huge pride we've now opened the we've opened the executive board we've now got a first woman on the board we're going to get more we've now got women and leadership roles in our locals in our staff and it's a long hard program to keep working because people pass through the union they come and go and so you were a leader on Thursday but you're retired on Friday and so you got to find new leadership and so we've now got a program within the women of steel program to mentor ever another mentor other women we're sending will be the largest union delegation at the United Nations Conference on Working Women we'll have probably upwards of 20 women from US and Canada at that UN conference we have a women's committee that interacts with a new organization that we created called Workers Uniting which is the it's the creation of a new union between Unite the union in Great Britain and the United Steel Workers so we created a new labor movement institution called Workers Uniting it's now chartered in Britain Ireland United States and Canada and we have joint training programs based on our back to the locals program so we have people that go over to London or Ireland we have people that come back to United States or Canada who participate in joint training programs we have a leadership development program a four-year program this year we have people from Sweden from Germany from South Africa from Australia from Great Britain in our leader in our leadership development program with our members and with our women and now we've got us another program we're going to call the Lynn Williams Scholarship Program where we're going to try to take what appears to be the best and brightest of our people of color our women our young people next generation and put them into an advanced leadership program the theory is that this year we might have 10 but if we do 10 for 10 years that's a hundred and how do you broaden that base and those are all people that can take their knowledge somewhere else which is I think one of the reasons why we've had success in so many mergers that's how you said you started yeah the web effect yeah and just out of curiosity which which I guess industry is where there's the biggest presence of women oh now so the biggest single presence of women now is in our health care sector we have about 50,000 health care workers and again the history of the union we were the first health care union people don't know that during the period from 1935 to 45 and through the war a guy named Henry Kaiser was I mean I can't remember exactly his positions he was a senior person in the Roosevelt government and he was extremely rich he owned steel mills aluminum mills what not but they were all primarily out in the west coast and he was a pretty decent guy he didn't oppose unions and all that jazz and he decided that his workers needed a clinic so he created a clinic for his workers and a real clinic not to make believe one like inco used to have but a real one and we were the first union at the clinic that has evolved into the Kaiser health care system our local in California local 7600 is the original local of the Kaiser health care system back in the 40s and there we have about 9,000 members in that health care system and so as a result of that in places where we're the dominant union primarily in the United States up in the iron range the Virginia West Virginia corridor we've got people that want to be in a union and they chose the union because we're the dominant union in that area so that network is 80% women and and the other thing that's happening is that in many of our industrial settings we've been pushing hard for 30 years that the companies have to be a reflection of society so we're getting more and more women and as we get them into leadership roles in our union it helps convince the employers that they need to have more women too so if you say which industry has got the most per capita women it's the health care members that we have in our union but if you go into our industrial settings it be hard to say which one was the most but in each one of them the membership of women is growing to switch it up a little bit you are and have been for years a strong sport of green economy and I've seen you mentioned that a few times yeah could you elaborate and how do you see this coalescing with mining and metallurgy well look at the there there there's things that I remember from my youth I don't know if I said this I I lived in a company house in lively Ontario we went to the company clinic and I can tell stories about that I went to the company school where the superintendent of the school was actually a superintendent at Creighton Mine and I wasn't till I was about 20 years old that I understood you could run track without sucking in sulfur fumes the the the sulfur emissions from the smelter blew cross country to where I went to school lively high school copper cliff the schools that I worked or had friends at and I remember there was a a road from a part of Sudbury called Gatchel to a place called copper cliff we're in the spring in the fall it would get so foggy that you'd have to have someone standing outside walking alongside the car for a quarter mile three quarters of a mile to make sure that you didn't run into somebody and they could try to try to say keep to the left keep to the right and I can remember inco saying that that wasn't their fault we had an environmental committee in our local guy by name of Paul Falkowski chaired it he just stayed on them and stayed on them and stayed on and finally they built a reservoir to hold it back while it cooled off and the fog went away so and if you remember that Sudbury region where people walked on the moon before they got ready to go to walk on outer space our union created an environmental committee I was not it I was not even there yet and and again this guy Paul Falkowski and others in the in the local Mickey McGuire and others fought for environmental rehabilitation so that inco created a nursery underground with artificial lighting and lots of humidity to grow plants to plant and to transplant the region and so if you were went to look to Sudbury in 1970 it looked like a barren wasteland you go to the Sudbury region now it looks like brand new forest yeah 320 lakes within the city limits of which you can swim in 290 or fish or you know so that that the larger that is the unions fighting for it and they had mentioned they had started a greenhouse underground yeah is that because none of it would have survived above land no I think it was just because it was a much better environment it was constant humidity and they put artificial lighting and the things just grew faster it was lighting 24 hours a day and humidity 24 hours a day and so it just was a better place and in fact it it morphed into doing a lot more than I think they were growing tomatoes and cucumbers and I was long gone so so when I when I became president of the union with with the help of a person named Dave Foster we started pushing environmental issues and in fact we should get Scott we should get the two environmental papers we got our children's world that we did in 1990 the steelworkers union passed an environmental statement in 1990 that said one of the most important issues facing the future of the world was global warming we said that 1990 we said before most of the environmental movement was saying it and the reason as we see it and so we did a document called our children's world then we redid when eight or nine years ago called still our children's world or still not cleaner I can't remember the exact title and that was endorsed unanimously by our board and and part of it is that we understand that most of the time before things got out into the environment emissions and whatnot it came out of the plant and our members would suck it in if we didn't clean it up so then we concluded that there is the divide and conquer approach of sort of major corporations applied in this instance we'll keep the environmentalist mad at the industrial workers and we keep the industrial workers mad at the environmentalist that way we'll always be able to control what goes on and so we concluded that we should try to put that and stem it stop it and so we took a position as a union it's not a clean environment or good jobs it's not good jobs or a clean environment it's you'll have both or you'll have neither and so then how do we clean up our workplaces how do we take carbon out of the air I mean I think that there's a big there's a big mistake that some are making to think that you could run a global industrial economy without fossil fuels is just nuts you can't do that today you might be able to do it sometime in the future and we should have a plan to be able to reduce our need for fossil fuels but if you really want to take most of the carbon or the atmosphere we should redo all of our public buildings all of our private buildings our buildings are the largest emitters of carbon we should have a strategy about how to capture carbon and can we make use of it there's no research going on where they can take carbon out of the air and turn it into carbon fiber we do some of that kind of research so our view was there's good jobs in a clean environment there's a good job program and taking carbon out of the atmosphere how do you harm us that harness that there's good jobs in creating renewable energy through geothermal wind solar there's got to be a way to take and I saw some of this in Denmark how to take our our waste and convert it to energy in Denmark they've got a basically an incinerator that incinerates everything and it's right within the city limits and I'd say to the taxi driver I said if it's so efficient why do you have those stacks he says well we've got stacks and we've got bag houses on them just in case it was an emergency I said how often have you used them he said I don't think they've ever been used so that so there's there's an opportunity there one small incinerator I'm told can take the equivalent of 15 feet high of the equivalent of one football field per year of waste so I'm not married to anything but what I think is that you've got to have a blue-green strategy if if cleaning the environment people lose their jobs then they'll fight about that if people who have jobs don't want to clean the environment they'll fight about that how do we bring two together so we're advancing the environment creating good jobs and so you know that that I always wanted to have Sudbury become the after we did the rehabilitation of the land I always believe that Sudbury could be a center for renewable energy at one time and again I've been gone from the details for a long time but at one time Sudbury was considered the sunshine capital of Canada got more hours of sunshine on it per year than almost any other place of the city so if that's the case you get all these huge tailings fields that we're now growing weed on that they'll nobody ever eat put solar panels up there you got miles and miles of put solar panels up there well then you know that's not at the time it wasn't Incos primary focus it's certainly not Valley's focus but it's something that we should think about how could you create a company that would rent the space from Valley put solar panels up there and sell to the grid so I mean our union thinks about that not just me everybody that's why we create the blue green alliance that's what you're referring to we create the blue green alliance and right now I got a meeting of the blue green alliance in a few minutes on the telephone the blue green alliance has 15 million affiliated members and when we started there was me Dave Foster and Carl Pope and we had a press conference in the press club in Washington and five journalists two of them I think were drunk showed up that was it so this is ten years later ten years later we got almost 15 million affiliated members through the Sierra Club environmental events fund the United Steelworkers a bunch of other unions I mean that got six of the major environmental firms in about 17 unions affiliated to the blue green alliance and we we meet and we develop strategy we debate issues internally and you don't very often see us fighting in the street because we've done most of things behind closed doors trying to come to consensus which is good I'll finish with a couple more questions one I like to often ask and I like to see you see your take on this but do you believe there's a disconnect between the general public and the natural resource world and it'd be interesting to get depends what you mean by the natural resource world you mean mining mining metallurgy you go with petroleum too I mean yeah look at I actually think that there's a there's a huge disconnect and and look at it I maybe call it the Sudbury story that I was telling you about when when Inco would deny that the hot water emissions that were coming out of the smelter were causing the fog that caused accidents during the spring and fall more than more than the winter when Inco would deny that the place looked like the moon because of their actions people got to see that's what Inco is that's what mining is that's not what it is today okay and the same thing happens in the paper sector when we would drive to Espanola where my uncle worked the smell of rotten eggs as they would call it I would start to moan and complain and my dad would say shut up that's a smell of good jobs now you go to Espanola you don't smell any that but they're still making paper and but people my age would still remember Espanola the way it was then and so the paper industry the mining industry steel industry lots of the energy intensive industries did not do a good job and in many ways are not doing a good enough job of connecting what used to be there 30 years ago is not in the way it is now and you know take for example forestry Canada and the US both but Canada primarily have the most sustainable forestry practices in the world people don't see it that way they still see them as these bastards clear-cut everything and you know they're leaving waste behind or the paper industry putting mercury into the water they don't use mercury anymore so these industries have not done a good job of connecting the current reality to what they do and because of that there's a negative reality on these industries and if you look at them from an economic perspective and particularly in Canada Canada is one of the most resource rich countries in the world one of the things that troubles me a lot is that we export our raw resources without adding value to them so whether you want the petroleum industry or the forest industry we export raw logs but we don't add value to them making them into timber or two by fours we export raw crude well why don't we finish the raw crude by higher environmental standards then it's going to be done in China bring value to them and if we use them for our own basis fine but we can also export some with value add and create jobs fishing industry the same thing mining industry the same thing so one of the things that Canada's done or not done is add value to its resources and has become as we used to say when I was younger you know he was of wood and drawers of water we know there's going to be a fight with the US between Canada and the US within the next 50 years over water if if California doesn't start getting its water back where they're going to want to they got to get it they're going to make a deal the Liberal government in British Columbia sent sold two million liters of water to Nestle's for 25 cents a liter we're going to sell water bottled water from Canada to Nestle's and they're going to export it you know make better use of our water than that so and you know the the other thing is that our union in Canada is attached to the mining industry in the steel industry and you'll probably have seen in the paper in the last couple of days some bosses got convicted and are going to be there sentenced to jail for killing the four people in Toronto off the scaffold yes our union has been running a campaign now since Westray the Westray disaster that killed 26 people those workers called my office while I was national director and I knew some of them from the Elliott Lake days who said Leo the emissions here and the cold dust here is worse we've ever seen we need a union or else we'll get this cleaned up I sent an organizer there two days after he got there the mine blew up 26 workers were killed no one paid a price even though there was a royal commission who said it was the management's decisions so we started a campaign called stop the killing the Westray bill it took us 10 years we got the Westray bill passed federally it became the law of the land no one had ever been convicted we started a program three years ago we met and run from coast to coast saying if you're willfully neglect and someone gets killed you can be held criminally responsible we're not interested in putting people in jail per se we're interested in clean workplaces and if you have the possibility of facing jail time you'll probably make sure your workplace is safer and that you take the right measures so it's a sad reason to be pleased but the fact that these guys got convicted is the first conviction under the Westray bill in 15 years now and our interest is safe workplaces not putting people in jail but this now sends a signal to everybody and we're not gonna stop we're having meetings with police associations with coroners the RCMP with crown attorneys with ministers of labor we're having meetings in communities where we're having community meetings in places because our objective is to get safe workplaces workers shouldn't go to work to die or to get sick well I think we'll stop it right here okay but thank you very much okay is that enough for you did you want to