Sandra Azocar, who started working for the Alberta Government as a child protection worker in 1987, has been elected president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE).
The 59-year-old Chilean-born union activist, AUPE’s executive vice-president since 2021, defeated longtime President Guy Smith on the second ballot in voting at AUPE’s annual convention in Edmonton this weekend. Another AUPE VP, Bonnie Gostola, also campaigned for the union’s top job.
Azocar said later that she hoped to “hit the ground running to ensure our members get the recognition and respect for the work they do on behalf of Albertans every day.”
“We hope to focus on AHS bargaining while supporting all the other tables we are currently bargaining,” she added.
However, AUPE has no plans to rejoin national and provincial labour organizations like the Canadian Labour Congress, Azocar said. AUPE was suspended from the “House of Labour” in 2002 during a dispute over membership raids on CUPE Alberta health care locals and formally disaffiliated in 2006.
“No, our members have been clear that although we understand the need to work shoulder-to-shoulder with our labour allies, joining the House of Labour is not the direction that we will be pursuing,” Azocar said.
Azocar served as a vice-president of the province’s largest union from 2006 until 2012, when she became executive director of Friends of Medicare.
For close to a decade at Friends of Medicare, she became a familiar face to Albertans as spokesperson for the organization, which is frequently in the news advocating vigorously for the protection and enhancement of publicly funded, publicly delivered universal health care in Alberta.
Back at AUPE in 2021, Azocar was elected again as a vice-president and has served in that role since then. She has also served as chair of two AUPE standing committees, Pay and Social Equity and the Women’s Committee. She is a member of AUPE’s Local 6, which represents social services workers directly employed by the Alberta government.
Azocar was among the approximately 8,000 Chileans who took refuge in Canada in the 1970s after the violent military coup in that South American country. She arrived in Canada with her family in 1975.
Smith, 63, AUPE’s longest-serving president, has held that office since 2009, winning election by delegates to the union’s annual convention seven consecutive times and becoming one of the best-known figures in Alberta’s labour movement. He is also a member of Local 6.
The change in leadership comes a week before Licensed Practical Nurses and Health Care Aides represented by AUPE are scheduled to begin taking a strike vote.
With approximately 95,000 members, AUPE is Alberta’s largest union and among the 10 largest unions in Canada.
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