Sid Ryan

Patrick Cyril "Sid" Ryan (born 1952) is a Canadian labour union leader and politician.

Ryan is the former president of the Ontario Federation of Labour.

Born in Dublin, Republic of Ireland, and third eldest of ten children, Ryan emigrated to Canada at age 22.

He and his wife Sheila have three daughters: Lisa, Susie, and Amanda.

Ryan helped to organize a United Steelworkers of America (USWA) local where he worked shortly after arriving in Canada.

He has been a Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) activist since he went to work for Ontario Hydro in 1976.

In addition to his union activities, Ryan has been involved with the New Democratic Party (NDP) since the 1980s.

He has served on the Ontario NDP's provincial council and Environment committee, and is a former president of the Durham Centre riding association.

Ryan's affiliation with the Ontario NDP became tenuous in the early 1990s, when some felt that the party had moved to the right under Bob Rae's leadership.

On one occasion, he referred to the Rae government's austerity "Social Contract" bill as the most anti-labour piece of legislation he had ever seen.

He subsequently resumed supporting the provincial party under Howard Hampton's leadership in a bid to rebuild the NDP/Labour relationship.

Ryan has stood as an NDP candidate in three provincial and two federal election campaigns.

He served as CUPE Ontario president from 1992 to 2009, representing 225,000 workers in the public sector.

CUPE Ontario added 75,000 new members under Ryan's leadership.

CUPE is the Canada's largest and fastest growing union with nearly 600,000 members.

CUPE Ontario is the largest provincial division.

He ran for the party provincially in 1999, 2003 and 2007, as well as federally in 2004 and 2006.

He is the recipient of the Canada 125 Medal, presented to Canadian citizens for their contributions to the good of the community and society in general.

He contested Scarborough Centre in the 1999 provincial election, and finished third behind Progressive Conservative incumbent Marilyn Mushinski and Liberal Costas Manios.

In the 2003 provincial election, he campaigned in Oshawa and came within 1,109 votes of defeating PC incumbent Jerry Ouellette.

Ryan moved the NDP's vote from around 5000 to over 18,000 during the course of his campaigns in Oshawa.

Ryan also stood as a candidate for Oshawa in the 2004 federal election, and lost to Conservative Colin Carrie by 463 votes in a very close three-way race.

He ran again in the 2006 election, but, despite considerable support from the federal NDP leader Jack Layton lost by 2,802 votes to incumbent Carrie.

Ryan also served as general vice-president of CUPE National until 2009.

Under Ryan's leadership, CUPE Ontario focused on issues such as privatization, forced mergers, cutbacks, restructuring, healthcare, free post secondary education, universal childcare international solidarity and human rights.

Ryan continues to lead major campaigns and proactively influence policy and legislative decisions in health care, municipal, school board, social service, and university sectors.

He is a proponent of increasing the accessibility of university education across Ontario.

Ryan appeared weekly for 10 years on Michael Coren Live and CHEX-TV Durham, CFRB 1010 and writes a bi-weekly column for the Toronto Sun.

He is also a frequent guest on TVOntario's current affairs programs, The Agenda with Steve Paikin CBC TV and radio, CTV, CP24.

He has written op-ed pieces for all the major Canadian newspapers.

He is a frequent speaker in the Canadian labour movement.

Ryan has been recruited by human rights groups to act as a Canadian peace observer in Northern Ireland, to march alongside members of the United Farm Workers in California, he went to Texas with Ruben "Hurricane" Carter to lobby Texas politicians for a commutation of Stanley Faulder's death sentence, he championed the rights of Palestinians and was instrumental in having CUPE Ontario support the BDS campaign in order to exert peaceful pressure on the State of Israel to end the conflict with Palestine.

He worked tirelessly with unions from across Canada and South America to defeat the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).

He has worked for the New Democratic Party during every election since arriving in Canada.

In November 2009, Ryan was acclaimed to the position of president of the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL).

He was re-elected for a second term in 2011 and again in 2013 and retired in 2015.

During his six years as OFL president 4 unions undemocratically withheld union dues from the OFL because they disagreed with Ryan's leadership from the first day he was elected.

Canada's largest private sector union, Unifor, which had supported him in the past, refused to support his re-election to a fourth term and instead supported a Unifor staff person who worked for Unifor President Jerry Dias.

Following his retirement in 2015, Ryan wrote a book 'A Grander Vision'about growing up in Dublin, Ireland and his life in the Canadian labour movement.

The book was published by Dundurn Press in April 2019.