A passenger walks by striking Air Canada flight attendants hold placards as they defy a back to work order at Vancouver International Airport in Richmond, B.C., last month.Chris Helgren/Reuters
David Moscrop is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
If you want to understand how the federal political calculus has changed in recent years, look no further than the Air Canada labour dispute.
When the company’s flight attendants went on strike for better pay and working conditions, the Liberal government almost immediately ordered binding arbitration, effectively stripping the union of collective bargaining rights that have been recognized by the Supreme Court. But then, there were the Conservatives, criticizing the airline, pushing their Fairness for Flight Attendants Act, and backing members of a public-sector union as if they were New Democrats. “No worker – federally regulated or otherwise – should be forced, especially by the government, to work without being paid,” Conservative labour critic Kyle Seeback said.
The federal Tories are clearly drawing from the Ontario PCs’ playbook in their attempts to appeal to labour. The party has backed anti-scab legislation, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre appealed directly to the working class during the last campaign. The Tories also recently called for an end to the temporary foreign worker program, though Mr. Poilievre said he would maintain provisions for short-term agricultural labour, a sector particularly rife with exploitation. Employers have long used the program to take advantage of foreign workers, suppressing both domestic wages and employment rates.
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These problems are inherent to the program itself, and the Conservatives are as much to blame as the Liberals. In 2013, prime minister Stephen Harper – who had complained that employers were growing too reliant upon temporary foreign workers and vowed reform – expanded the program; Mr. Poilievre was a member of that government. And while today’s Conservatives are backing flight attendants, Mr. Harper’s government allowed some airlines to increase the ratio of passengers per crew member and passed back-to-work legislation to prevent a 2012 strike of more than 11,000 Air Canada workers. But now, in opposition, the Conservatives are styling themselves as a worker’s party, aiming to annex territory traditionally held by a now-diminished NDP and outflank a Liberal government headed by a technocratic banker fixated on the economy.
Are the Conservatives acting out of a genuine belief that workers deserve better or cynical self-interest? To some extent, it may not matter.
The Tories’ accusation that the Liberals are failing to support workers at least smacks of truth. When push comes to shove, as it invariably does in labour politics, Mr. Carney has shown himself inclined to side with management, and before him, Justin Trudeau did the same, with his government intervening in a handful of labour disputes involving, among others, port workers and mail carriers. The Liberals have a tendency to cite the national good as a reason for curtailing worker rights but to define the national good as maintaining economic stability and the corporate status quo.
The Conservatives, who aren’t in government and can thus ignore the pleas of boards of trade and the business lobby, can back workers all they want. At least for now, they won’t be asked to follow through as the executive decision makers, even if they have the power to shape policy direction in a Parliament with a minority government. And so, despite their own long-standing reputation as a thoroughly pro-business and anti-worker party, the Tories might just gain on this terrain.
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The NDP may at some point regain its official party status, but that’s a future consideration. Whether Canadians buy what the Tories are selling is a question that will only be resolved after the next election. But in the meantime, the Conservatives will keep trying to outflank the NDP and the chameleon Liberals, and if they can leverage their pro-worker rhetoric to shape today’s policy agenda, then the outcomes will be as real as can be, whether or not they mean what they say.
The philosopher Jon Elster writes of “the civilizing force of hypocrisy,” a process by which public deliberation or other forms of political exchange “does not eliminate base motives, but forces and induces speakers to hide them.” Once norms, expectations, goals, promises and preferences are established, it becomes tricky to abandon them without paying a price. Whatever the reason the Conservatives may be courting workers, they can shape events in the process, such that workers do stand to come out ahead.
As the Air Canada dispute continues, the government will likely do what Liberals tend to do: try to have it both ways. They will recite pieties about the bargaining table and promise to stand up for hardworking Canadians. But when zero-sum or particularly controversial conflicts arise, the Liberals will revert to their instincts: backing the board room over the break room. And in those moments, you can bet the Conservatives will be waiting with a podium and a promise that they would have done better for workers.