Kevin Libin: Big Labour is getting the same sweet deal from Trudeau that it gets from Kathleen Wynne

Ontario seems pretty chuffed with the way the Trudeau government has been marching to Queen’s Park’s tune lately


Time is nearly up for the provinces to finalize their agreement with Ottawa over the expanded Canadian Pension Plan. The race is on for bureaucrats at both levels to hammer out details to meet an aggressive July 15th deadline, set just three-and-a-half weeks after most first ministers agreed to a hasty, uncompleted plan on June 20th. The reason for the rush? That’s what Ontario insisted upon as its condition to dropping its own ill-considered pension scheme. Ontario’s finance minister demanded a “drop-dead date” before agreeing to cancel the Ontario plan, which had been lambasted by economists and the business community, and which Ottawa desperately needed to kill. Critics have called this a “hasty” way to make a serious change affecting all Canadian employers, workers and their retirements. Manitoba, which hasn’t yet agreed, wants more time to suggest changes.

Ontario seems pretty chuffed with the way the Trudeau government has been marching to Queen’s Park’s tune lately, with Premier Kathleen Wynne openly taking credit for being the “thorn in the side” of the other leaders that made the CPP deal come together. But last week, another group took credit for convincing the government to forcibly deduct more savings from your paycheque, with union leaders, who have been pushing for fatter CPP contributions for years, celebrating what they call an “unprecedented” camaraderie with the federal Liberal government.

Speaking to The Globe and Mail on Friday, Hassan Yussuff, the president of the Canadian Labour Congress, crowed that whenever he needs a minister or deputy minister on the phone, he always gets one, unlike the dark days when a Conservative minister might not return a message. He’s already had meetings with ministers overseeing finance, trade, labour, industry and transport. Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, said he’s “spoken with more ministers in the last six months than the previous 10 years” and finds himself chatting with someone in cabinet pretty much weekly. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce didn’t even get a meeting with the finance minister over its concerns about expanding the pension plan.

Whether Wynne’s Ontario Liberals or Big Labour enjoy the biggest clout in Justin Trudeau’s government may be a mere matter of semantics. Their agendas are often aligned, as with the CPP, where the unions were craving a bigger slice of the government pension to make negotiated defined-benefit pensions richer and more affordable, and Wynne wanted a new pool of pension cash to fund her spending plans. Both are on board with the Liberals’ plan to run sizeable deficits to fund bigger government programs and heavier infrastructure spending. And both are vehemently anti-Conservative, with Ontario’s unions having spent millions in provincial elections on advertisements attacking the provincial PCs, and mobilizing volunteers to campaign for the Liberals. The Liberals have returned the favour by arranging handouts to the unions’ political action groups and tailoring provincial policy and public contracts to buy “labour peace.”

Union leaders are celebrating “unprecedented” camaraderie with the federal Liberals

Given that the arrangement has kept Ontario’s Liberals in power for 13 years, despite a record of scandals that would make even a Chicago politician jealous, it’s not hard to see why the federal Liberals would seek to make their own cozy alliance with organized labour, while neatly dismembering the longstanding marriage between the NDP and the union movement. Some of the same architects that helped invent the formula for Liberal unbeatability in Ontario are now working for Trudeau, including principal secretary Gerald Butts, who held the same position under former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, and Katie Telford, Trudeau’s chief of staff, formerly a senior cabinet operative in the McGuinty government. The prime minister was already getting cozy with labour while he was still an opposition MP, hiring himself out to numerous union groups for speeches (and pocketing five figures a pop), while promising to reverse the Harper government’s hard-nosed labour approach. The unions came out in force to campaign for Trudeau last year, running anti-Conservative ads through a front group, Engage Canada, run by Don Guy, another veteran McGuinty aide. One trade group even paid members to attend Trudeau’s photo ops, violating the Elections Act.

As in Ontario, the favour is happily being repaid. In addition to ramming through the bigger CPP, the Trudeau Liberals are repealing two Conservative laws that infuriated union leaders. One requires unions to disclose their spending to the Canada Revenue Agency, including political activity, and another ended for federally regulated workplaces the old “card-check” system of certifying unions, which allowed shop bosses to intimidate or manipulate workers’ votes, replacing it with secret ballots. Recently, Treasury Board President Scott Brison said he would soon introduce a bill that would undo Conservative rules that defined an “essential service” in the public sector and limited the ability to strike.

But three years ago, a Harris/Decima survey (commissioned by a teachers’ union, actually) found that most Canadians don’t think public sector workers should be allowed to strike at all. And the percentage of private sector workers belonging to unions has been steadily declining for decades. Still, it appears the death of the labour movement has nevertheless been greatly exaggerated. In Canada’s halls of political power, big unions are enjoying as much influence as ever.

