Thirty-six years from the pole line to the bargaining mandate

Mandate

Lead the people side of the Bracewood acquisition, renew both collective agreements and build the field skills a rural fibre programme and an ageing trades workforce required.

Outcomes

• Brought 610 Bracewood cable technicians into the craft unit by service date; their voluntary turnover fell from 23% to 8% by 2025.
• Outsourced only the overnight queue and simple billing chats, saving C$10.1m a year with no layoffs instead of the C$18.6m offshore proposal.
• Started 128 fibre-splicing apprentices in four cohorts; contract splicing spend fell from C$21.4m to C$11.8m.
• Renewed the craft agreement in 2023 and the clerical agreement in 2024 without a work stoppage.
• Lost-time injury frequency reached 1.3 per 200,000 hours worked in 2025.

Decisions in context

I succeeded a chief human resources officer who had built strong payroll and benefits services but had left labour relations largely to operations. My first months went on closing that gap and preparing for the craft renewal; the Bracewood acquisition then reshaped the agenda. I led the workforce side of the transaction from its announcement in May 2022 to closing in January 2023, and the transition terms that followed. Since then the work has turned on three decisions: how Bracewood's technicians joined our unit, which customer calls stay in our own centres and how we train splicers for the rural build. I write the bargaining mandates with finance and operations, take them to the board's human resources and compensation committee and lead the employer team at the table. I sit on the pension committee as a management member. I am not a director of Keswald or of its holding company.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; leading the 2027 renewal of the craft agreement.

Mandate

Renew the craft and clerical agreements, reduce field injuries and rebuild working relations with the craft union after a bitter 2015 renewal.

Outcomes

• Negotiated the May 2018 location-data letter and the two-person storm rule after a technician went missing in a January blizzard.
• Lost-time injury frequency fell from 2.9 to 1.6 per 200,000 hours worked between 2017 and 2021.
• Settled the four-year 2019 craft agreement and the 2020 clerical agreement without a stoppage.
• Cut the grievance backlog from 640 to 190 cases through joint monthly resolution meetings by region.

Decisions in context

Keswald asked me back eleven years after I had left, and the company I returned to was smaller and harder in tone. The 2015 craft renewal had been ratified with 52% of the vote and had left more than six hundred grievances outstanding. I was given labour relations, field safety and field workforce planning together, on the view that the three cannot be separated in a company whose people work alone in trucks. I reorganised grievance handling around monthly regional meetings with the files on the table, and I put the safety representatives' data in front of the executive committee every month. The January 2018 incident in the Miramichi turned my attention to lone-worker safety, and the letter we signed with the union that spring became our template for introducing monitoring technology. The 2018 sale to private owners changed our governance but not our agreements, and I made sure the new owners understood them.

Reason for the move

Appointed chief human resources officer when my predecessor retired.

Mandate

Bring agent attrition under control, build an HR function for rapid growth and open the company's first centre outside Canada.

Outcomes

• Reduced annualised agent attrition from 68% to 44% with fixed schedule blocks and a rebuilt first week of training.
• Opened the Cebu centre in 2013 and staffed it to 1,900 agents by 2016.
• Raised the share of team-lead roles filled from the agent floor from 22% to 61%.
• Introduced one job architecture across seven sites in two countries.

Decisions in context

Quillon took me out of telecom operations and into the business of answering other companies' customers. It was non-union, growing quickly and run on thin margins, and attrition was the figure every client asked about. We fixed schedules in blocks rather than weekly, rebuilt the first week so that new agents took real calls with a coach beside them, and created a promotion track that let agents become team leads within two years. In 2013 our owners decided to open a centre in the Philippines for clients' overnight and overflow work, and I led its people build, from local employment advice to hiring the first four hundred agents. I spent long periods in Cebu. I also watched clients move queues between our Canadian and Philippine sites, and saw what they gained and what they quietly lost, which became the basis of my later view on sourcing.

Reason for the move

Recruited back by Keswald to lead labour relations and the field workforce ahead of difficult renewals.

Mandate

Resolve a long dispute over northern postings and travel, and staff repairs in remote communities without relying on fly-in crews.

Outcomes

• Settled a four-year dispute over northern postings with a negotiated allowance and rotation schedule.
• Hired twenty-six resident technicians in remote First Nations communities, working with community-run training organisations.
• Cut average repair waits in fly-in communities from six days to two.
• Concluded the 2006 and 2009 agreements without a stoppage.

Decisions in context

Redwillow was my first role outside the Maritimes and my first leading a team of my own. Its technicians served communities that could be reached only by air for most of the year, and the agreement's posting and travel rules had produced years of grievances: senior technicians bid for northern work, earned the allowance and rotated home, while communities waited for repairs. I negotiated a settlement on allowances and rotation, then argued that the larger answer was hiring people who already lived in those communities. We did so with community-run training organisations in several First Nations, hiring twenty-six resident technicians, and repairs became much faster. By 2010 eleven of the twenty-six had left, and their reasons were consistent: we had created an entry-level role with no path to a full trade. That failure has shaped every community hiring decision I have made since.

Reason for the move

Moved to Quillon Contact Services to lead an entire people function and to return to Atlantic Canada.

Mandate

Handle grievances and arbitrations for field crews, then lead field labour relations and prepare the 2002 craft renewal.

Outcomes

• Reduced the field grievance backlog from 410 to 118 cases by 2003 through joint step-two meetings.
• Served on the employer bargaining team for the 2002 craft agreement, settled without a strike.
• Drafted the company's first written limits on storm-duty hours with the union's safety representatives.

Decisions in context

I joined Keswald's labour relations team four months after finishing my degree and spent my first three years on grievance and arbitration files for field crews in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Having been a steward made me useful and occasionally awkward: I could tell when a grievance was really about a supervisor, and I said so. As manager of field labour relations from 2001 I introduced joint step-two meetings, at which the union and supervisors went through the files together each month instead of exchanging letters, and the backlog fell by more than two-thirds. On the employer team for the 2002 craft renewal I learnt to cost a proposal before tabling it. I also wrote, with the union's safety representatives, the company's first rules limiting storm-duty hours. I left in 2005 because I wanted to run something, and because Redwillow's northern staffing problem interested me.

Reason for the move

Recruited by Redwillow Telecom to lead labour relations and field workforce planning.

Mandate

Complete a three-year apprenticeship, then build and maintain cable plant in the Madawaska and Restigouche areas.

Outcomes

• Completed the line technician apprenticeship in 1993.
• As union steward from 1994, resolved 34 of 40 grievances before arbitration.
• Served on the union's bargaining committee for the 1996 agreement.
• Co-wrote the company's first joint rules for ladder and strand work after a colleague's fall.

Decisions in context

Pellerin hired me at nineteen, straight from college, to climb poles and string cable in some of the coldest country in the province. I learnt the trade from journeymen who had their own unwritten safety rules and expected an apprentice to follow them without discussion. In 1993, after a colleague fell when a strand anchor failed, the technicians voted to join a union, and the following year I became a steward. I spent four years representing colleagues in grievance meetings and one bargaining round on the union's committee, which taught me how an employer's proposal reads to the people it governs. I studied in the evenings for a business degree, mostly to understand why the company bargained as it did. By the time I left I was leading a crew of six. Almost everything I believe about how rules for field work should be written began on that crew.

Reason for the move

Completed my degree and accepted a labour relations post at Keswald Communications.