SCOOP: OPS loses longtime negotiator-in-chief

And the cost of Bill 124

ABOVE THE FOLD

First in Observer — BYE-BYE BARGAINER — The Ontario Public Service is losing its chief negotiator smack dab in the middle of rocky contract talks.

After 35 years, MARC RONDEAU — associate deputy minister at the Treasury Board’s Centre for Public Sector Labour Relations and Compensation — is hanging up his civil servant hat on July 31 and headed to the Ontario Pension Board.

It’s a big loss — no one does what Rondeau does. He’s what one source with first-hand knowledge of public sector bargaining calls the “proverbial employer” to all the OPS unions, including teachers — for which negotiations are still plodding along — and physicians. He’s also the enforcer of the hotly contested wage-capping Bill 124 (more on that below).

“Though the Secretary [of Cabinet] and Deputy Minister are above him and provide him instruction, it’s him and his team who do the actual bargaining,” our source says. They have the “broadest spectrum of labour relations in the country, bar none” and d…