Political power in a union?

It’s a strange thing to hear from a leader of the federal Conservative Party.

But there it was, as plain as can be.

Here’s Erin O’Toole in his first House of Commons appearance as Conservative leader on Oct. 1: “As a kid who grew up in a General Motors family, I also know that some of those organizations that help build strong communities are unions. Organized labour helps build strong communities. Unions foster community and workplace cultures where workers know that someone has their back. … Workers know that someone is fighting for them, as opposed to just agreeing with whatever the government says, like that member; someone who will fight for them when they are sick; and someone who fights for them to avoid the steel and aluminium tariffs that the government allowed to be applied on our hard-working families across the country.”

It wasn’t an isolated incident or throwaway comment.

There it was, again, in an O’Toole speech to the Canadian Club last Friday: “It may surprise you to hear a Conservative bemoan the decline of private sector union membership. … But this was an essential part of the balance between what was good for business and what was good for employees. Today, that balance is dangerously disappearing. Too much power is in the hands of corporate and financial elites who have been only too happy to outsource jobs abroad. It’s now expected of a shareholder to ask a CEO: ‘Why are we paying a worker in Oshawa $30 an hour when we could be paying one in China 50 cents an hour?’”

It sounds more than a little odd, and, as O’Toole says, surprising for a Conservative leader.

Some have suggested it’s a tilt towards a sort of Trumpian economic nationalism — building a nascent Canada-first style economic policy that champions industrial manufacturing inside the country.

Others have suggested that it’s more politically pragmatic. It could be a way of trying make the party more palatable to unionized voters while the NDP seems truly cosy with the Liberals, all the while knowing that labour is an area that is actually a provincial responsibility, so the Tories would need to offer much more than kind words.

But it just might be that it’s something deeper: that workers, who are no doubt feeling even more isolated and alone during the COVID-19 pandemic, might be seeing stronger and stronger reasons to unionize.

Individual workers often feel powerless. They feel even more powerless in the face of a pandemic, and a campaign that supports a return to a union paycheque might seem like a return to the mythic “good old days.”

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but Tories and unions in the same bed seems like one of the strangest pairings of all.