Earlier this week, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees published an update on contract negotiations for careworkers in Wetaskwin.
These 50 or so workers are employed by the Ontario-based Seasons Retirement Communities at their continuing care facility in the central Alberta city.
They include kitchen workers, housekeepers, dietary aides, care attendants, health care aides, concierges, and those working in the lifestyles department.
Their most recent collective agreement expired at the end of 2023, nearly 2 years ago, and they still do not have a new agreement.
The workers’s bargaining committee—which includes a health care aide, a housekeeper, and a cook—began contract negotiations this past August.
At the first meeting, Seasons Retirement Communities proposed a 2-year contract with a 2% wage increase in each year. This is a shorter collective agreement than their previous contract, which was 3 years long. However, the wage increase is slightly higher than the annual average increase in the last contract, which was 1.92%.
Inflation during their last contract ended up being 10.92%. A combined increase of 4.75% over the course of that contract left the workers with a cut to real wages of 5.17% after their last wage increase.
A 4% wage increase over 2 years would not be enough to cover that shortfall, and the workers’ bargaining committee counteroffered with something that would.
According to AUPE, Seasons Retirement Communities came to the next session with another wage proposal. Instead of increasing how much they were proposing each year, they offered to extend the collective agreement by another year, with a slightly higher increase in that third year: 2.25%.
Here is what you must keep in mind.
Since these workers received their last raise in January 2023, inflation has increased another 7.41% (up to September 2025, which is the latest data we have). That brings their real wage cut to over 12.5%.
This new wage proposal does not cover even half that, plus we still have over a year of more inflation to come before this theoretical 3-year collective agreement would expire, pushing the wage–inflation gap even higher.
The workers’ bargaining team thought it was too low, so they countered and waited until their next bargaining meeting for a response.
Well, according to this week’s update, that meeting was on the 29th of October. The only problem was that Seasons Retirement Communities never showed up. In fact, they failed to even sign any of the articles that the two parties agreed to in August.
As a result, the workers’ bargaining team has filed for formal mediation.
