Former Unifor national president Jerry Dias, who was accused by his own organization of improperly accepting $50,000 from a vendor, became increasingly panicked in his final days before retiring, and exerted pressure on a former assistant who had made the initial complaint about the alleged payment.
Mr. Dias used his power and influence within Unifor to get his current assistants to persuade the whistle-blower, Chris MacDonald, to withdraw his complaint so that an investigation into Mr. Dias’s conduct would not proceed. One of those assistants was Scott Doherty, a close friend of Mr. Dias who is now running in Unifor’s election for its next president.
These allegations, and other specifics of the events that led up to Mr. Dias’s abrupt retirement from Unifor this year, are contained in a 29-page third-party investigative report that was reviewed by The Globe and Mail. It was prepared by the employment law firm Turnpenny Milne LLP and submitted to Unifor on March 15.
Some of the report’s contents were already known to the public, but the document in its entirety contains previously unknown details.
It paints a picture of a culture of fear at Unifor, the country’s largest private-sector union and suggests Mr. Dias had a stranglehold over his assistants, prioritizing loyalty over ethics and even promising gifts to the most faithful among them.
During Mr. Dias’s nine years at the helm of Unifor, he was perhaps the most respected face of Canada’s labour movement, with a...
; ; ; agreed to pay $17.07 million to settle federal allegations of illegal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring practices on Friday, marking the Justice Department's first resolution unde...