What the Union of Northern Workers’ new leader is thinking

The new president of the Union of Northern Workers spent time with Cabin Radio setting out some of the changes he’s hoping to make.

Bassel Sleem, formerly president of the City of Yellowknife’s union local, was elected to replace Gayla Thunstrom as the union’s leader last week. The UNW represents thousands of workers across the NWT.

Sleem said he moved from Lebanon to Winnipeg six years ago to study city planning, then took a job as a planner at the City of Yellowknife. His first taste of union life was strike action at the city in early 2023.

“When we went on strike in 2023, I got motivated to get involved as a strike captain,” Sleem told Cabin Radio.

“I had leadership and community-building spirit since I was a kid, so I think it just translated naturally into the union world. I found there was so much fulfillment in that role.

“You’re connecting with your fellow coworkers face to face in -40C, so you’re forming really strong bonds and you’re hearing about their problems and their struggles in the workplace, and that just lit a fire in me to want to continue advocating for them.”

Sleem thinks the union can do a better job of bringing its locals together and advocating for its members. Here’s how he explains the approach he hopes to take.

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This interview was recorded on October 30, 2026. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ollie Williams: Yours was quite a quick journey to becoming president of a sizable union. How do you think you’ve connected with members?

Bassel Sleem: I think there are around 7,000 UNW members across the Northwest Territories. My experience has been mainly in the Yellowknife local, but PSAC and UNW offers lots of opportunities to get involved in different committees, different conferences, so you still form connections with people outside of Yellowknife.

I’ve met many people from other regions in the NWT, also people from Yukon, and labour activists tend to talk to each other. So I wasn’t only visible in Yellowknife in the past three years. Some of the concerns I’ve been hearing were outside of my workplace. They were concerns that involved the union and people’s relationships with their union.

Over the past three years, I started paying more attention to the UNW and how it does its work, how it reports on its activities, and that made me want to get more involved on that level because I saw potential for improvement.

When you say you saw potential for improvement, what is it you saw?

It goes back to what I was campaigning on, which is “connected locals, collective strength.” One of the things I didn’t see is locals knowing each other, or knowing what the other local does. We represent members across so many workplaces over so many regions, but they share a lot of similar problems: cost of living, housing, recruitment, retention.

When I say opportunities, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel in some places. If it’s working for a certain local, it can work for another local in a different region. But right now, there’s no efficient way for those two locals to communicate to each other, either face to face or digitally. So I see a lot of improvement that can be done in our operations, and then I also see a lot of improvement that can be done in how we advocate for members.

When I say collective strength, that means us being as one group, as a solidarity, but we also have to recognize we are individual groups that need specialized representation. Nurses and healthcare professionals, mine workers – certain groups need specialized advocacy, and I think that is missing a little bit right now.

Mediation with the GNWT is coming up in January. You’re the union’s president, but you are not its entire bargaining team. Still, you have a voice and you have some insight into that. What is your message as the incoming president of the UNW as we head into that mediation?

I’m entering a very important stage in bargaining. There’s a lot that happened over the last several months, so my first step is to get caught up to speed with what’s been happening.

We have an amazing bargaining team that is setting certain priorities. I would see my role as supporting them on more of an advocacy level with our politicians, but also I would like to work on how we mobilize our workers over the next couple months. I do have experience with that in my City of Yellowknife strike, so I think I can bring that perspective to the bargaining team.

When you say work on mobilizing, do you mean the preparation, the planning, people understanding what it actually means if they get to the stage of needing to go out on strike and being ready for that?

Exactly. People need to be informed of what has happened in the process and, if they’re signing any kind of agreement, they need to be fully informed of that.

Front and centre of every union in Canada right now is Bill C-39, which talks about what powers federal ministers have to intervene when they decide it is in the national interest to get people back to work. What do you think the UNW’s voice is going to look like in that over the next six months or a year?

Bill C-39 affects a lot of our workers. It’s limiting our strike ability to the voice of potentially one person. As a union activist, it’s not something the union would advocate for.

This is where I think collaboration with other organizations like the Northern Territories Federation of Labour, for example, would be very beneficial – Canadian Labour Congress as well, as well as PSAC. I was just in a meeting with NTFL’s president, Sara-Jayne Dempster – shoutout to her – and we were talking about Bill C-39. NTFL is technically the political arm of our union movement, so I think that’s where we can collaborate on some good advocacy over there.

What else is already on your desk?

November is going to be a busy month. Other than Bill C-39, I’m going to be flying to start meeting some of our members across the regions. Hay River Health and Social Services is also in the process of transitioning [into the GNWT’s bargaining unit].

What has this past 24 hours [getting elected] felt like?

This entire week has been a whirlwind.

The build-up to the election yesterday has been very meaningful to me because I met lots of new members that I haven’t met before – people coming from Inuvik, people coming from the Sahtu, Norman Wells – and they did not know me, so they had no reason to trust where I’m coming from. But we had really good conversations over this week and I think people saw my real intentions, that I am really here to serve members and serve northern workers.

When the announcement happened and I got a good number of votes, I was very taken by the reaction. I was very touched by the reaction that I got, because it really shows that people want change and people are putting their trust in me.

I’m not going to take this responsibility lightly. If any UNW member is listening out there, just know that I’m going to have your back over the next three years.