The Canadian Media Guild has added staff over the past few weeks to meet the needs of our growing union.

It is a pleasure to announce that Rick Warren is the successful applicant for the British Columbia region staff representative position. He begins the job April 4 and he will be primarily responsible for representing Guild members in British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

Rick has worked in the media industry for more than 30 years, and has been an ENG and EFP (field production) camera operator at the CBC since 1983. He has served in many union capacities for CEP at the CBC: as a member of its grievance and negotiating committees and as a temporary CEP staff representative in 2003 and 2004. He is also co-chair of the joint CBC-CMG Performance Management and Staff Development National Steering Committee.

Rick is currently on the CMG bargaining committee. He will split his time between the bargaining committee and serving members in the BC region until contract negotiations are over.

Karen Wirsig joined CMG’s staff in January as communications coordinator, replacing Keith Maskell who formerly did both communications and staff representative work primarily at TVOntario, VisionTV and on the freelance file. Keith will now concentrate on his work as a rep, while Karen is doing communications on a full-time basis. This was a key resolution at last year’s Fusion conference in Ottawa.

Karen is bilingual and comes to the Guild with a mixture of journalism and political advocacy in her background. She was a reporter for a municipal-news publication in Toronto called NovaeRes Urbis (NRU). Before that, she was president of her small CUPE local when she worked for the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto.

I’d like to welcome Rick and Karen to the CMG team.

Lise Lareau
CMG National President