Letter to the EditorI read with interest the articles you published on the Legault government's decrees in response to the pandemic. I too believe that they are not a solution to this serious crisis. It doesn't bode well because it takes away workers' rights. When you force workers to observe rules they had no contribution in adopting, the measures cannot be implemented. In addition, decrees take away citizens' freedoms. Mandating the police to enter homes with telewarrants to see if there is an illegal gathering does not make any sense and does not bode well for the future either. I think a lot of people are starting to think that the COVID-19 problem is not being well managed, that decisions are being made too late in the name of not hurting the economy. And now the government is trying to catch up with its new decrees. My impression is that Public Health is being contradicted by the government in order not to harm the economy. The problem of COVID-19 is more complex than a question of government decrees. We are falling into abuse of power.
In the mining sector, we were in favour of adopting certain measures because we decided them together with the company through consultation. Now the tendency is developing that they inform us that they are going to put measures in place and we are just supposed to apply them. That's not consultation. We have the right to give our views because we have to live with the measures. For example, employers in the mining sector are talking about making masks mandatory in the mines. Did they think about the fact that underground we work at 38 degrees Celsius and 100 per cent humidity? The workers are not going to wear them. Moreover, it has already been proven that ordinary masks will not protect us from the droplets through which the virus is transmitted. Will they give us N95 masks? The measures must be scientifically proven and the workers must be mobilized in the solution of the problem. If we want the measures to be applied but workers are not involved in the decision-making process, it is doomed to fail. If you proceed by imposing measures, workers will challenge you. Workers must be involved in the decision.
To be able to do this, the workers' representatives must have cutting-edge information to make decisions that provide the best possible prevention. Because in fact, it is prevention that we are talking about here. If the employer alone decides on the measures, prevention will not take place. We are talking about the health and safety of the workers and communities. Workers must have a say in what is going to happen. A mining worker in Abitibi (Translated from original french by Workers' Forum.)
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For
example, they still haven't solved the problems facing nurses. Nurses have
crying needs that are still not being addressed after months of
pandemic. The government calls them our guardian angels but the angels
are on the front lines and are exhausted and many are resigning.
Mandatory overtime still exists. Nurses are not allowed to speak up
when faced with situations that don't make sense in hospitals. If they
do speak, they are disciplined by employers. It's like the code of
silence, the 
If
health measures are put in place, workers must be given information and
on-the-job training on the application of those health measures. In our case,
when we adopted the measures at the beginning, after consultation with
our workers, we even toured with the foremen in the mine to promote the
measures. The purpose of the tours was not to say
that we were very satisfied with the measures, but that we thought they
were the best measures available to us in the current context to
prevent people from contracting COVID-19.