Annual BBQ feeds and educates Hatters

By Jeremy Appel on September 4, 2018.

jappel@medicinehatnews.com @MHNJeremyAppel

The Medicine Hat and District Labour Council held its annual free Labour Day barbecue Monday to educate Hatters about all the workers’ movement’s achievements often taken for granted.

“Annually, we put on a barbecue just to bring attention to the importance of labour … for vulnerable populations,” Clifton Campbell, the vice president of the MHDLC, said at Riverside Veterans’ Memorial Park, where the event is held.

Campbell said he anticipates as many as 200 people attending, which he said is a typical turnout for the event.

“We want to make sure that when people go to work, they have their needs taken care of and they go home as healthy as they went into work,” Campbell said.

To that effect, the MHDLC is currently promoting universal pharmacare and affordable childcare, as well as supporting the provincial government’s gradual minimum wage increase .

Bryan Meakin, vice president of Alberta and the North for the Union of National Defence Employees, says labour is “what makes the world go ’round.”

“Without labour, you wouldn’t have the technology (and) you wouldn’t have the scientific advancements that we have,” said Meakin.

“People demand and deserve respect. Without the labour movement, we wouldn’t have the long weekends, we wouldn’t have weekends (or) paternity parental leave.”

Medicine Hat MLA Bob Wanner, who was also in attendance, expressed his “personal interest in organizations that help the vulnerable and those who have much less quality of life than the rest of us do.

“As a caring community and province, we ought to remember that many of us, but for the grace of God, might be in the same situation.”

Much of what’s great about Medicine Hat can be attributed to the labour movement, Wanner added.

“The lifestyle we have is almost entirely based upon strong unions with good, dedicated employees — our streets, our parks, our fire services, our police services,” he said.

“Everything that’s important to us came as a result of hardworking union members who made us great.”

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