ONTARIO: Harris Announces new Hate Campaign
Graeme Bacque (gbacque@idirect.com)
Sat, 24 Oct 1998 05:33:07 -0700
October 24, 1998
Mow 'em down
DUSAN PETRICIC The Toronto Star
The Harris Tories need a bogeyman to run against. In '95, it was welfare
recipients. This time it's the hated unions.
THE IMAGE at last weekend's provincial Conservative party convention in
Ottawa could not have been more stark.
Cocooned inside the convention hall were some 2,000 Tory delegates and
hangers-on; outside on the street were approximately 7,500 protesters
representing dozens of unions and their locals.
Besides a handful of reporters, no one from the convention ventured
outside to talk to the protesters. But inside, in a series of speeches
from their leaders, including Premier Mike Harris, the Tory delegates
heard a lot about the unions, who were described as the real enemy in
the next election campaign.
``We didn't set out to make it an anti-union convention,'' Tom Long, the
Tory campaign chairman, said afterward. ``But it (the series of
anti-union remarks) accurately reflected how we feel.''
What has the Tories agitated is talk that labour will spend as much as
$10 million in the next election campaign to ensure their defeat.
That figure may be an exaggeration. There is no central fund into which
unions are contributing. Various unions, from the teachers to the
autoworkers to the nurses, are planning individual campaigns to educate
their members and the voters, and the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL)
is trying to co-ordinate it all, but many loose ends remain.
Still, even if the labour movement spends just $5 million to defeat the
Tories, it would be the biggest non-party intervention in an election
since the federal campaign of 1988, when unions and their allies squared
off against the corporations over free trade.
And, as the Tories were quick to point out to the media at the
convention, it would be more than they themselves are allowed to spend
under the campaign finance law, which limits each party to a budget of
just $4 million on advertising and other ``candidate advocacy.'' There
is no corresponding limit on non-party advertising.
That $4 million figure is somewhat misleading, however. It does not
include expenditures at the local riding level (where each candidate
will be allowed to spend up to $100,000). Nor does it include
pre-election spending by either the parties or the government, which is
currently running anti-teacher ads paid for by the taxpayer.
Nevertheless, Long told the delegates, ``they (the unions) are smart,
well-financed and very determined. We will have to be very aggressive in
responding.''
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At first glance, the Tories would seem to be over-reacting to the
unions' threats to defeat them; objective evidence suggests the unions
have already lost the battle.
The Tories are, after all, back in front in the polls, with the New
Democratic Party, the unions' chosen instrument, running a poor third.
And there are signs that the unions are growing weary of their constant
battles with the government. A one-day ``general strike'' planned for
this fall was cancelled. And last weekend's demonstration drew one-tenth
the number of protesters who swarmed the Tories at their meeting in
Hamilton in 1996.
Tories say this is proof that the rank-and-file union members are far
less concerned about the government's policies than are the ``union
bosses.''
Indeed, as some union leaders privately acknowledge, lots of their
members voted for Harris in 1995 because they found his anti-welfare,
anti-quota message appealing. It was, for example, no accident that the
Tories won in Oshawa, a heavily unionized town that had been a solid NDP
seat for the two previous decades. The Tories took it by a two-to-one
margin.
And earlier this month in a by-election in Nickel Belt, another heavily
unionized riding, the Tories increased their vote substantially and came
a strong second.
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Despite such evident successes, the Tories are maintaining a tough,
anti-union line - and at the convention they did not even bother to
distinguish between the ``union bosses'' and their members in their
attacks. Why? Three reasons:
Ideology. The Tories came to office determined to ``restore the balance
between labour and management,'' which they believe had been tilted
under the previous NDP government. They started by repealing Bill 40,
the NDP's so-called ``anti-scab'' law, but they didn't stop there. There
have been a series of bills since aimed either at curbing the powers of
specific unions (notably, teachers and construction workers) or at
making it more difficult for labour to organize.
Some Tory backbenchers would like to go even farther and trash the Rand
formula (under which all employees covered by a bargaining unit, union
memebers or not, must pay union dues or impose U.S.-style right-to-work
laws.
Ignorance. Few Tories who attended last weekend's convention are now or
ever have been members of unions. To many of them, unions are dark,
alien forces that get in the way of legitimate commerce.
The Tory caucus, too, is dominated by small businessmen from
non-unionized areas such as real estate and insurance or former
employees of union-hostile companies such as Wal-Mart and The Toronto
Sun. The vast majority of them have had little or nothing to do with
unions in their lives and are deeply ignorant of them.
Politics. Targeting the unions is a way of marginalizing the real
opposition - the Liberals and New Democrats - by ignoring them. And it
gives the Tories a bogeyman to run against, as they had in 1995, when
the target was welfare recipients.
``They're trying to create an enemy,'' says OFL president Wayne
Samuelson. ``That saves them from having to talk about health and
education.''
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But there are pitfalls for the Tories in this approach, especially if
labour decides it doesn't want to be a target. It's one thing to run
against a labour movement that is openly challenging the authority of
government with a series of shutdowns; it's more difficult to attack a
movement that confines itself to peaceful protests and advertising.
Last spring, NDP Leader Howard Hampton was publicly worrying that the
Tories would call an election this fall in response to growing labour
strife, including a province-wide teachers' strike and an OFL-sponsored
general strike. But labour ducked.
``We knew that the government wanted us to be a target this fall,'' says
Earl Manners, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers
Federation (OSSTF). ``We deliberately tried to avoid being a target
because we wanted the issues to speak for themselves.''
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) might still provide
the government with a target if its members decide to strike after their
contract expires on Dec. 31. ``We're very clearly being set up,'' says
an OPSEU insider. ``But there's no such thing as an ambush where the
ambushee knows it's happening.''
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Relations between Queen's Park and labour have not always been so
confrontational, even with the Conservatives in power. When he was
president of the OFL in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cliff Pilkey met
then premier Bill Davis five or six times a year. He also sat on Davis'
economic advisory committee.
``We had an excellent relationship,'' Pilkey says today. ``He (Davis)
would never give us a full loaf, but he'd give us half a loaf on things
that we thought were important.''
Contrast that to today's situation, where the Premier and labour are
barely on speaking terms.
Since Wayne Samuelson was elected as OFL president last fall in a hotly
contested race in which he was portrayed as the more moderate candidate,
he has met just once with Harris. The meeting was in June in the
Premier's office and lasted half an hour. While it was cordial, says
Samuelson, ``he (Harris) didn't listen to anything I said.''
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So why should Harris bother listening to the unions if they are trying
to defeat him? Because Ontarians expect their government to pursue a
``balancing of interests,'' says political scientist Sid Noel in a
recent essay on the province's political culture.
``The norm of balance,'' he writes, ``requires that governments at least
make a serious attempt to consult and accommodate divergent interests,
however difficult that may be. The Harris government may not be
enamoured with those it defines as `special interests,' but interests
considered `special' . . . by the government of the day are not exactly
new. They have been around for at least 200 years, and wise governments
have always come to the conclusion that the province as a whole is best
served when they are included in the balance.''
The Harrisites have turned this political paradigm on its head and made
a virtue of confronting special interests instead of accommodating them.
``I want you to know how proud I am of our caucus and our supporters and
all of those in our party who were prepared to take the heat from the
vested interests to put Ontario back on the right track,'' Harris told
delegates in his convention speech.
In next year's election, we will learn whether the Harris Tories have,
indeed, found a new way to govern Ontario or just an old way to go down
to defeat.
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