[1980] OLRB Rep. June 926
0224-80-R; 0225-80-R Service Employees International Union, Local 183 A.F. of L., C.I.O, C.L.C., Applicant, v. Trent Valley Lodge Ltd., Respondent.
BEFORE: M. G. Mitchnick, Vice-Chairman, and Board Members F. W. Murray and B. L. Armstrong.
APPEARANCES: Jeffrey Egner and Phylis Marier for the applicant; K. W Kort, Dr. T. G. Watts and Mrs. Jean Ogden for the respondent.
DECISION OF THE BOARD; June 2, 1980
1These are two applications for certification which were consolidated by the Board.
2The name of the respondent is amended to read: "Trent Valley Lodge Ltd.".
3At the hearing, a preliminary matter arose concerning one of the Form 8 declarations filed in support of the applicant's membership evidence. The declaration purports to be made by Phylis Marier, the Union's organizer, but was signed "Phylis R. Marier/per JS". The Board accordingly asked Mrs. Marier, who was present at the hearing, to take the witness stand and explain the circumstances under which the Form 8 was signed.
4Mrs. Marier has been an organizer for Local 183 of the Service Employees International Union, the applicant, since October of 1979. Her office is in Belleville. The Form 8 in question accompanied 19 of the 26 membership cards submitted by the applicant with its two applications. Mrs. Marier was not the actual collector on any of the cards submitted by the applicant. She testified that the campaign was well under way by the time she was introduced by the Local President to the two individuals who were doing the collecting, and roughly half of the cards submitted had already been signed at that time. From that point it became her responsibility to do the "paperwork" for the campaign and help with house calls if necessary. The cards which had already been signed were turned over to her along with the dollars collected. At that point Mrs. Marier asked the two collectors if each girl that signed a card had paid the dollar and they responded that each girl had. The three then mapped out the rest of the campaign. As additional cards were collected by these two individuals, the cards would be given to one of them, who would then bring them in to Mrs. Marier's office. Mrs. Marier is only in her office approximately one day a week, and the collector would leave the cards with the secretary if Mrs. Marier was not there. Mrs. Marier testified that she would quite often call the collectors after cards were left at her office and ask them how they were making out, or they might call her and let her know that they had left additional cards with the secretary. On these occasions, according to Mrs. Marier's evidence, the discussion would normally concern whether the collectors had any other employees in mind to visit. Once, one of the collectors told Mrs. Marier that she had to go back to see one particular employee again because the girl did not have the dollar on her first visit, and Mrs. Marier responded, "that's good", meaning it was proper to wait until the employee had the dollar. In contrast to the cards left at her office, Mrs. Marier's testimony was that when any cards were handed to her directly, she went over them with the collector personally and asked whether a dollar had been paid to the person who signed as collector.
5There were three Form 8 Declarations concerning Membership Documents filed in support of the two applications for certification. Two of those Form 8's, including the one in question, were signed and submitted by mail on April 29th. The terminal date for the applications was May 8th. On the day the forms were mailed, Mrs. Marier had signed the first form but left to deal with another nursing home in Gananoque before signing the second. Mrs. Marier phoned in to her office, and the secretary advised her that she had forgotten to sign the second Form 8. Mrs. Marier at that point was 68 miles away from her office, and explained to the Board that if she returned that day to sign the form, she would arrive after the post office had closed. She was anxious that all of the material go to the Board at once, and the Local President had asked her to get it in as soon as possible. Since she had checked all of the membership cards in the morning, she asked her secretary to read the Declaration to her paragraph by paragraph. When the secretary had done that, Mrs. Marier instructed her to sign and mail the form. The final point to be mentioned is that Mrs. Marier indicated that the manner of making inquiries which she described in connection with the Form 8 signed by her secretary was the manner applied in connection with the forms which she signed herself.
6On examining the evidence as set out above, it appears that Mrs. Marier made the inquiries necessary to complete the Form 8 Declaration with respect to any cards which were delivered to her personally, but the same cannot be said for membership cards left at her office when she was absent. Paragraph 3 of Form 8 reads:
"(Where the documentary evidence consists in part of receipts or other acknowledgments of the payment on account of dues or initiation fees.) On the basis of my personal knowledge and inquiries that I have made, I state that the persons whose names appear on the receipts or other acknowledgments of the payment on account of dues or initiation fees are the persons who actually collected the moneys paid on account of dues or initiation fees and that each member, on whose behalf a receipt or an acknowledgment of payment is submitted has personally paid in money the amount shown thereon on his own behalf to the person whose name appears on his receipt or acknowledgment of payment as collector, EXCEPT IN THE TIME FOLLOWING INSTANCES:"
Mrs. Marier's evidence amounts to this: that sometimes she made the inquiries necessary to the proper completion of the Form 8 Declaration, and sometimes she did not. The Board, however, has always required a higher standard of compliance than that in dealing with the Form 8 Declaration, because of the total reliance which the Board normally places on that Declaration in accepting hearsay evidence of membership. See National Steel Car, [1966] OLRB Rep. Jan. 738; and N& D Supermarket Limited, [1976] OLRB Rep. Mar. 112. The Board notes, for example, that the failure to make inquiries in the present case would never have come to the Board's attention had it not been for the circumstance of Mrs. Marier's secretary signing on her behalf on one of the forms. The Board does not have to deal in this case with the effect that that fact alone would have had other than to express its concern that having a Form 8 signed by someone other than the declarant (even though openly) could, in some circumstances, raise a question over the appreciation of the solemnity of that declaration, and the reliance which the Board normally places upon it.
7The evidence discloses however that the necessary inquiries were in fact not made with respect to all the cards submitted through Mrs. Marier, as required by Form 8. This omission raises a question concerning a substantial number of the cards filed; it is impossible for the Board to determine from the evidence precisely which cards, and how many. From Mrs. Marier's evidence, the cards in support of the second application appear to be affected as well, those cards appearing by their dates to fall within the latter half of the applicant's organizing campaign, being the period over which uncertainty has arisen. The final Form 8 submitted on May 5th clearly falls into this category as well. In the result, the Board finds that it is unable to place reliance on any of the Form 8's filed in support of these two applications, and there being no substantiation, as required by the Board, of the membership evidence submitted, both applications are hereby dismissed.
8As indicated when these reasons were delivered orally at the hearing, the Board wishes to make it clear that it has found no intent on the part of the applicant to deliberately mislead the Board nor any defect in the membership cards themselves as far as they go. The defect is in the inadvertent omission of the necessary inquiries to substantiate that evidence, through the Form 8 Declaration, and it is on that basis that the applications have been dismissed.