Newly elected SEIU-West president Lisa Zunti has big ideas to make healthcare better
The Labour Day Report
Stephen Whitworth
August 26, 2025
Once they settle on a leader they like, Saskatchewan’s unionized workers seem perfectly happy to stick with them.
Case in point: Larry Hubich, who served as the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour’s president for 16 years from 2002–2018. Before Hubich, labour legend Barb Byers led the Fed for 14 years.
It’s a trend at the province’s other major unions, too. Tom Graham was CUPE Saskatchewan’s president from 1998–2020. Bob Bymoen held the top post at SGEU from 2002–2021. And at SEIU-West, a union that serves many of Saskatchewan’s healthcare providers, Barb Cape had the high seat from 2008 until this past May — a term that doesn’t count her five years as president of SEIU-West’s predecessor, Service Employees International Union Local 299.
The popular Cape’s decision to not run for re-election this spring opened the door to a new president with fresh eyes and ideas. Enter Lisa Zunti, a nurse at St. Paul’s and Rosthern Union hospitals who now leads the union’s 13,000 members.
In the press release announcing her election, Zunti characterized her win as the beginning of a bit of a shake-up. “I’m excited to take on this role and help this organization to evolve and do new and great things,” she said. “I think I bring a different perspective. I can speak to the realities facing our members in both urban and rural settings, and how this impacts the care our patients, clients, and residents receive.”
In a mid-August phone interview, Zunti says she hit the ground running and hasn’t stopped.
“It’s been very different moving up to this from my prior positions,” says Zunti. “I was on the shop floor in the operating room, and in a rural hospital in palliative care just before I was elected. I bring a different perspective in that sense, in that I literally worked the week until Friday, then Monday went into the office to be the president. I am fresh off the work floor.
From Hospitals To Union Offices
Lisa Zunti started her career in healthcare in 2006, shortly before the Saskatchewan Party government was first elected. Over her almost 20 years in the field, she’s seen policies come and go. Zunti was there when the Wall government imported car company ‘senseis’ to find efficiencies. She worked during the pandemic and escalating addictions crisis.
Zunti is new as SEIU-West’s president, but she’s not new to the challenges facing health care workers.
“I’m an LPN,” says Zunti. “I’ve worked in numerous areas and hospitals. I’ve worked in palliative care, operating rooms [and more]. Lots of different experiences with being part of that system.
“I’ve seen people treated terribly at work, and I’ve personally been treated terribly in the workplace.
“I was put on this odyssey many, many, many years ago,” Zunti says. “About two years [in], we had a situation in our unit where, honestly I can’t even remember what it was, whether it was a schedule change or whatever it was, but there was so much trepidation and fear in the staff. It was kind of my impetus for getting involved and becoming a shop steward.
“As soon as you’re set on the course of being that person, you really just get swept into it,” says Zunti. “I can’t leave someone with no one to turn to. And that’s really what it comes down to. I will never leave you with nobody.”
A Complicated System
Lisa Zunti isn’t naïve about the work her new position demands.
Healthcare for a province — even one with ‘only’ 1,247,000 people — isn’t simple.
“I completely understand the challenges that are faced not only by the healthcare system, but by the workers IN the healthcare system — and the people that access the healthcare system as well,” Zunti says. “Because they’re the heart of the matter.
There’s a lot of work to be done for both caregivers and the public they serve.
The provision of public healthcare is complicated. There are managers. Doctors. Finances. Policymakers in the provincial government. And, of course, workers.
Even if all parties at the table always saw eye-to-eye on the issues — and they don’t, but if they did — solutions to healthcare delivery problems would still be incredibly complicated.
“I am about 60 days in here, so it’s pretty new,” says Zunti. “I’m part of the nursing taskforce in partnership with the other provider unions and the minister of health. What I’m trying to do is look at solutions outside of simply hiring more bodies.
Case in point: patient transfers.
“One thing that makes it difficult is when patients come from different hospitals, they get assigned different numbers,” says Zunti. “There isn’t a nice flow of information from one hospital to another—or even from one unit to another. There isn’t something that follows them seamlessly all the way through.
“Here’s another thing. There isn’t a standardized chart in the province,” says Zunti. “Somebody can come from a unit within a facility and their chart looks different. Somebody can come from a different town, and their chart is different. There isn’t just a standard, ‘this is the way it is,’” she says.
The result: time wasted and the risk of miscommunication amplified.
“It’s like decoding it all the time,” Zunti says. “Even for someone experienced, it can be dangerous and confusing just because sometimes we need that information quickly. And if I can’t find it where I think [it should be] in that chart, it delays care.”
Zunti is also concerned that the frontline workers delivering the actual care itself are too often left out of the policymaking loop.
“There have to be policies in place for the safety of the patients and the workers,” says Zunti. “But I’m talking policy and how it’s delivered.
“The biggest thing I think has changed in healthcare for the workers is the [loss of] autonomy to decide a lot of the care for the patients,” says Zunti. “And what I mean by that is, there’s so many policies and procedures [that were put] in place for one-off [incidents] that it takes away, piece by piece, the freedom to decide what’s best for patients.
“It affects patient care because it takes decision-making away from the frontline staff, and they end up with no input into how the health system is delivered,” adds Zunti.
“And they are the ones delivering it. They know the best,” she says.
Adjusting The Thermostat
One of her first moves, says Zunti, is turning down the temperature on sometimes heated union-government interactions.
“It’s easy to focus on the worst,” says Zunti. “There are some things that have gotten better. A few good things came out of the Patient First initiative years ago, such as checklists in operating rooms — that’s a safety measure that has definitely helped.
“I’m trying to change the relationship between unions and employers, and unions and government that’s in power to try and facilitate useful plans together,” says Zunti. “It doesn’t do any good if we’re fighting each other all the time.”
Another advantage of a fresh set of eyes?
“Yes,” says Zunti. “And I’m taking full advantage of that.”
