AD Group: No news to report at this time.

AS Group: No news to report at this time.

CS Group: The Bargaining Team has been established and is in the process of preparing initial bargaining demands.

OP Group: No news to report at this time.

PG Group: NRC has completed its analysis of our demands and is in the process of securing a bargaining mandate.

TO Group: The bargaining sessions that were scheduled for March 24 and 25 have been postponed.  We expected that NRC would have a mandate by now and that they would be able to address many of the outstanding bargaining demands. In fact, NRC has not yet even approached Treasury Board for its mandate.  They tell us that they are still reviewing our proposals. We have made it very clear to NRC that this is unacceptable and that we expect them to make every effort to secure the mandate and to bargain with us in a timely manner.

Pay Equity: Several meetings have been held with the consultant.  It became apparent at these meetings that the issue of retroactivity of any pay inequity needed to be dealt with now rather than somewhere down the road.  We have therefore been working on the development of a new methodology that will allow us to review jobs going back to 1985 in order to determine whether there was a pay inequity and, if so, how large it was.  The need to structure the study around a 14 year period will undoubtedly add some time to the process, but will, we believe, save time in the long run and more importantly, provide us with more reliable and accurate data.