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http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/05/16/union-made/
The NDP’s union-made caucus
The real power structure in the party comes from organized labour
by John Geddes on Monday, May 16, 2011 9:45am - 5 Comments
Union made
After all the drama and tension of a landmark election, Canadians
probably needed a little comic interlude. The NDP provided one,
although quite unintentionally. They served up the whimsical story
of Pierre-Luc Dusseault, 19, whose upset victory in Sherbrooke,
Que., made him the youngest MP ever, and meant he’d have to forgo
his summer job on a golf course. Then there were the three McGill
University students who will have to suspend their studies after
surprising even themselves by capturing Quebec seats. And, of
course, there was Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the assistant pub manager
at Ottawa’s Carleton University, who hadn’t even visited the
Quebec riding of Berthier-Maskinongé before winning it handily.
Just as well, since Brosseau’s French isn’t so good and most of
her constituents don’t speak English.
Jack Layton spent much of his first post-election news conference
fending off questions about the scant experience of these and
other rookies in his much enlarged Quebec contingent. With the
collapse of the Bloc Québécois, an astonishing 58 NDP MPs from the
province were elected on May 2, up from just one, Montreal’s
Thomas Mulcair, before the election. But if all the attention on
Layton’s youth brigade suggested an NDP caucus characterized by
dewy-eyed campus idealism, that’s a misleading impression. In
fact, the front benches of the second party in the
House—traditionally seen as a government-in-waiting—will feature
many tough-minded former union leaders. “We have some pretty major
labour folks,” says veteran Vancouver NDP MP Libby Davies. “That’s
a connection to a very solid base of activism, an understanding of
politics and how it works.”
Davies herself came to federal politics by way of a position with
the Hospital Employees’ Union, along with five terms on
Vancouver’s city council. Among MPs expected to be assigned
high-profile jobs by Layton, organized labour credentials are
predominant. Take, for instance, just those who have been
teachers’ union officials. Paul Dewar, who was NDP foreign affairs
critic in the last Parliament, and is sometimes mentioned as a
possible successor to Layton, is one. Irene Mathyssen, the London,
Ont., MP who chaired the NDP’s key women’s caucus before the
election, is another. They will be joined by rookie B.C. MP Jinny
Sims, who was president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation during
the 2005 strike, when it was fined for contempt of court for
ignoring a return-to-work order.
But the teachers’ unions are outgunned in Layton’s caucus by the
Canadian Auto Workers. Returning MPs with CAW backgrounds include
Nova Scotia’s Peter Stoffer and Ontario’s Malcolm Allen. Joe
Comartin, the Windsor, Ont., MP who was Layton’s respected justice
critic, is a former CAW lawyer. Another Ontario MP, David
Christopherson, was a United Auto Workers local president way back
in the 1970s, and has led the NDP charge on democratic reform
issues. Claude Patry, a retired CAW local president, was elected
as part of the NDP’s Quebec breakthrough. The best-connected New
Democrat in the current CAW, however, is Peggy Nash, a former top
negotiator for the union, who won back the Toronto riding she held
from 2006 to 2008.
Nash is the sort of union stalwart who drives Stephen Harper’s
Conservatives to distraction. In her previous stint as an MP, she
spearheaded resistance to the naming of retired oilman Gwyn
Morgan, a Calgary business icon, as head of Harper’s proposed
public appointments review board. Morgan was the Prime Minister’s
hand-picked choice to usher in a new era of clean federal
appointments. But Nash argued he was too much a Tory partisan for
the post, and she raised sensitive racial issues by criticizing
comments he had made linking immigration from the Caribbean and
Asia to crime in Canadian cities. Opposition MPs voted down
Morgan, and a furious Harper shelved the whole impartial
appointment-review concept.
Nash’s return to the House is touted by Layton’s top advisers as a
key addition to their bench strength. More than the impact of any
single politician, though, it’s the union culture so many NDP MPs
share that sets them apart from the Liberals they have suddenly
supplanted. Dewar says one big difference is organized labour’s
emphasis on contract bargaining. He says that showed in the way
the Liberals, along with the Bloc, allowed the Conservatives to
largely set the rules for deciding how documents related to the
contentious handling of Afghan detainees would be vetted for
release—terms the NDP rejected. “The Liberals,” Dewar says,
“didn’t have the experience and the skills to negotiate well.”
But few voters ever gain any sense of how MPs play their cards
behind the scenes in House committees and caucus meetings. It’s
the public impression Layton’s caucus creates that will largely
determine if he can prevent the Liberals from reclaiming their
traditional centrist political turf. Appearing to be too close to
organized labour could be a liability for the NDP. After all, only
a minority of working Canadians belong to a union, about 30 per
cent last year, down from 38 per cent in 1981. Unionization rates
are lower still in the private sector, making the influence of
public sector unions in the NDP a potential issue. And that
influence is substantial and looks to be growing, with the
election of potential caucus heavyweights like Nycole Turmel, the
former president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, and
Robert Chisholm, a former Atlantic regional director of the
Canadian Union of Public Employees.
The clout of these and other advocates for government unions could
be significant in the coming battle over departmental budgets.
Harper has vowed to find $4 billion a year in cuts to direct
federal spending, not including transfers to the provinces and
individuals. Dewar says the NDP is sure to oppose any job cuts
proposed to achieve those reductions. But he argues the NDP is
uniquely positioned to try to bring government unions into
discussions about saving money without shrinking the bureaucracy.
“We can actually talk to public sector unions,” he says, “about
finding ways to innovate.” And doing more than merely combatting
restraint at every turn, he adds, will be vital to solidifying the
NDP’s election gains. “The stereotype,” Dewar says, “is that we’ll
just oppose cuts and that’s it.”
Since its founding in 1961, the NDP has been formally linked with
organized labour. In fact, the party was a joint creation of the
old Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour
Congress. Still, as political science professors Lisa Young of the
University of Calgary and Harold Jansen of the University of
Lethbridge have written, unions never dominated the NDP to the
degree that organized labour long controlled social democratic
parties in Britain and Australia. Union representatives typically
make up less than a quarter of delegates to an NDP convention. In
2004, political financing reforms banning union contributions to
federal parties, along with corporate donations, seemed likely to
further curtail organized labour’s influence in the NDP.
Yet the bond endures. Young and Jansen, after interviewing labour
leaders and NDP officials about the end of union donations to the
party, concluded that “shared ideological commitment and
overlapping personnel are sufficient glue to hold together a
modified relationship.” That relationship can only strengthen with
the addition of a cluster of new MPs who bring senior union
experience. With its caucus ballooning to 102 MPs from the
previous 36, the NDP also needs to quickly recruit more than 250
parliamentary staffers, and supportive unions are expected to
supply many of the needed recruits. That influx of eager young
assistants might represent a new bridge between union offices and
the NDP on Parliament Hill.
Of course, not all NDP MPs come out of unions. Layton built his
political career as a Toronto city councillor, and urban activism
has emerged as another key incubator for NDP talent. MP Olivia
Chow, Layton’s wife, also made her name in Toronto city politics,
as an advocate, like him, on issues like homelessness and as an
opponent of some development schemes. Megan Leslie, a rising NDP
star since she was first elected in 2008, is a lawyer who worked
on social justice and environmental causes in Halifax. As well,
the NDP touts its experience from provincial government, led by
Mulcair, who was a minister in Quebec’s Liberal government before
jumping to the federal NDP in 2007. Layton never misses a chance
to mention the NDP’s track record of governing prudently in B.C.,
Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
He was scheduled to give his first speech since the election this
week at a CLC convention in Vancouver. The event was planned long
before the Tory minority fell and the election was on, but the
symbolism is potent. He can’t afford to drop what Brian Topp, one
of his key strategists—and executive director of the performers’
union ACTRA in Toronto—has described as Layton’s formula of
“optimistic, sunny idealism” and “fiscally prudent pragmatism.”
Those may not be themes traditionally used to rally a union
audience. But as the politician who has just brought Canada’s
labour movement closer than ever before to federal power, Layton
is in a position to set his own tone.
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