PrintUNA's 38th Annual General Meeting wraps up, union officers elected
United Nurses of Alberta’s 38th Annual General Meeting wrapped up Thursday afternoon after a full three days of important union business.
The 900 members, guests, staff and associate members who attended the AGM at Edmonton’s EXPO Centre heard from numerous speakers, including Alberta Health Minister Sarah Hoffman, Municipal Affairs Minister and former UNA local president Danielle Larivee, Canadian Federation of Nurses Union President Linda Silas, Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan and CARNA President Shannon Spenceley.
The keynote speaker on Tuesday afternoon was Stephen Lewis, former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and former leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, whose inspiring message included the advice to nurses to “use your voices and your collective strength to make demands that are insistent and reasonable.
“Because that’s the way we improve the human condition,” he explained.
“You belong to possibly the most important profession on the planet,” Lewis told UNA’s nurses. Citing the divisions in our world, and the work nurses do to heal them, he wondered: “How would it be possible to hold the human family together without nurses?
Health Minister Hoffman brought a message of respect and partnership from Alberta’s six-month-old New Democratic government, telling the elected delegates of UNA’s more than 30,000 members that, “for the first time, you have a government that is truly committed to health care. Preservation of public health care is in our DNA.”
Hoffman also pledged the government’s commitment to the legal rights of working people.
Larivee, a public health nurse in North Central Alberta until she ran for the NDP in the May 5 election, is now the MLA for Lesser Slave Lake. “If it wasn’t for the United Nurses of Alberta, I wouldn’t be here,” she said, thanking the union and its leadership for its commitment to advocacy for nurses and health care, which she said was the inspiration of her political career.
“I’m so glad I’m not sitting in my office wondering where the cuts were going to come and who was going to be gone,” she added, a reference to the NDP’s policy of continuing to support such essential public services as health care and education in the face of a downturn in revenues from resource royalties.
Silas reminded UNA members of the need for nursing organizations to stay focused on the mission of ensuring that policy makers hear their voice for public health care, as happened during the recent federal election campaign thanks to CFNU’s effective earned media and social media health care advocacy program.
And Spenceley of the College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta advised the members that registered nurses “are the key to fixing the health care system … we are everywhere.”
Among the important work of delegates to UNA AGMs is the election of officers. Union Executive Officers and District Representatives elected or acclaimed at the 2015 AGM were:
- Jane Sustrik, 1st Vice-President
- Daphne Wallace, 2nd Vice-President
- Roxann Dreger, North District Representative
- Terri Barr, Teresa Caldwell, Jennifer Knight, Jennifer Castro, North Central District Representatives
- Dianne McInroy, Central District Representative
- Amanda Bornholdt, Ken Ewanchuk, Eyituoyo Abati, South Central District Representatives
- Sharon Gurr, South District Representative
Note: President Heather Smith and Secretary Treasurer Karen Craik’s terms continue until the next AGM in 2016.
