Charlottetown mayoral candidates discuss labour issues ahead of municipal election

With a little over a week to go until Charlottetown’s election, residents are getting a sense of where candidates for mayor stand on labour issues.

Public sector union CUPE, which represents many city workers, held a town hall for mayoral candidates at the Murchison Centre on Oct. 20. About 100 people attended, including many of those running for council seats. All of the mayoral candidates were at the event, except Coun. Mitchell Tweel. The Guardian interviewed him for this story the next day.

Ashley Clark, CUPE P.E.I. president, moderated the town hall, asking questions about labour relations, last year’s water utility strike, artificial intelligence and anti-scab legislation. Here’s a look at some of the responses.

One of the first questions was about prioritizing public services. Daniel Mullen called for city workers to provide all city services, specifically saying the public transit system should be city owned and operated. Amir Zuccolo also said the transit system should be fully public.

Incumbent Mayor Philip Brown, though, defended the city’s public-private partnership model with T3 Transit, calling it a local success story. Brown also pointed to recent increases to the wages for entry-level seasonal staff and the number of full-time equivalent positions at the city.

Daniel Cousins said it is important to surround oneself with subject matter experts, and city union workers are these experts. Cousins also said those who work here should be able to afford to live here.

“It shouldn’t be that hard. We’re not a theme park. We are a community. We are the capital. We are the birthplace of confederation.”

Cecil Villard said in his time working for the provincial government he saw the creep of privatization in the health system.

“I’ve always had one simple motto: you look after your staff, they will look after you. Not very complicated. Respect people. Value the work that they do.”

He also supports making transit fully public, he said.

Anthony Fitzpatrick called for removing all privatization of city work, saying unions are key to government accountability.

Clark also asked about the 107-day CUPE Local 830 strike in the summer and fall of 2025, noting Brown broke a tie vote during that strike that would have had the council sit down with the union workers. Brown defended his vote, saying the language of the motion suggested there would be decisions made, and he did not want to intervene in the collective bargaining process.

“It’s a sacred piece of negotiation that was fought for by many union leaders over the years. Keep that in place. Keep the politicians out of the collective bargaining agreement.”

Fitzpatrick, who used to work for Paladin Security at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, said Paladin’s union nearly went on strike during his time. That only happens when there’s a real need and management fails the workers, he said.

Similarly, Villard, who had decades of management experience in the public sector, said a strike is a failure of management. He suggested some kind of labour management committee could help avoid this kind of conflict. All it takes is a commitment to sit down and fix the problem, he said.

Mullen said there would have been nothing wrong with sitting down with the whole local to find out what’s going on. It doesn’t need to be us against them, he said.

Zuccolo and Cousins both said a third-party mediator could have been helpful. Zuccolo said the trust between workers and the city is broken, and Cousins said the 100-plus day strike was shameful for the city.

Artificial intelligence came up a few times at the town hall.

Mullen said he has been calling for a moratorium on AI data centres in the city. However, he also described himself as a subject matter expert on AI, saying AI is here and widely used, even if people don’t always realize it.

“We’ve got to be aware of it. We have to have policies that make sense. And we have to say, what are we going to do to make sure that our workers are still going to be working.”

Brown disagreed that AI is coming and cannot be stopped. He suggested it is possible to unplug the robots.

Zuccolo, in turn, disagreed with Brown about simply unplugging AI. She pointed to recent reports of AI bots going rogue and escaping the control of humans. We need to be very careful about where AI goes, because it is not just another calculator or smart phone, she said.

Cousins was completely opposed to AI, saying it gives rich people skills stolen from workers.

Fitzpatrick was also against AI, saying there should never be a data centre here. That is what got him in the race, he said. One can already see robots taking jobs, giving the examples of self-checkouts or the robotic floor cleaners at Walmart, he said.

“As far as AI goes, never AI. I do not want a data centre here ever. That was the conversation, no matter what the details of it were, was what cemented my decision to run.”

He also argued AI plays a role in mass surveillance.

Villard was also opposed to artificial intelligence.

During the 2025 strike, the city hired replacement workers, commonly called scabs, on several occasions for jobs normally done by union staff. One of the questions asked about support for anti-scab legislation, which would prevent hiring replacement work and give strikes more power.

Everyone, including Brown, spoke against hiring scab labour. But there was not much detail on how a new mayor would push the province to adopt laws against it.

Cousins called the use of replacement workers a festering wound on union discussions.

Zuccolo said the city needs union workers.

“Anti-scab legislation, I am definitely a proponent of that. That work is to be done by union workers. We start to bring in those people to do the work, and that’s the slow creep of privatization.”

Other topics included the fire department union’s campaign to hire more full-time staff, which got wide support, and the release of costs for replacement work during the strike, which also got wide support. The Guardian caught up with Tweel after the town hall to ask him about these issues.

He fully supports hiring more firefighters, including a fourth responder for each call that goes out. He wants to open up discussions with the firefighters and administration. He also said Brown committed to releasing the costs of the union strike last year. If elected, Tweel would follow through on that promise, he said.

“I think the people have a right to know exactly what the cost of the strike was,” he said. “I put the motion on the floor to open up discussion with the water and sewer workers.”

Elections for many P.E.I. municipalities, including Charlottetown, Summerside, Stratford, Cornwall and Three Rivers, will be held Nov. 2.

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Logan MacLean is a municipal reporter for The Guardian in Prince Edward Island. He can be reached at lmaclean@postmedia.com and followed on X @loganmaclean94.