Un-modernizing Alberta

The reviews are in on the Alberta NDP’s new labour bill and most critics agree … it’s not as outrageously terrible as expected. That’s apparently what passes for good news in the province these days, where a sort of Stockholm syndrome has sunk in. Albertans, having inadvisably stumbled into the clutches of four years of union- friendly, carbon- hostile, socialist- inspired NDP rule, now feel grateful when some blows their government delivers are less painful than usual.

“This could have been so much worse,” the Edmonton Sun’s right- wing columnist Lorne Gunter reassures readers. The opposition Wildrose party has mostly griped that Bill 17 is too big and needs to be broken up, and also that it seems unfair that dozens of NDP legislators with personal union ties — even the premier, Rachel Notley, is herself married to a union administrator — should be voting on a bill that directly impacts union power. Business groups so far merely say the bill is too far- reaching to assess. That’s presumably how the NDP likes it, since the government is racing to pass the bill before the legislature’s spring session ends.

And the bill, at more than 250 pages and tabled after just a few brief weeks of consultation with those affected, was designed to be too large for Albertans to quickly digest. It reaches into every nook and cranny of the provincial labour market, rewriting the entire rulebook to reflect the NDP’s anti-capitalist worldview.

There are hundreds of labour code amendments packed into the so- called “Fair and Family- Friendly Workplaces Act,” each sprung from the assumption that Alberta’s workplaces are unfair and unfriendly, requiring the beneficent hand of progressive regulation to protect employees from the exploitations of heartless bosses.

This in a province that last year, in its worst recession in a generation, still saw workers take home Canada’s largest weekly paycheques, and where, before oil crashed, bars, cafés, retail stores and restaurants gave away trips and other prizes to young people willing to take highly paid entry- level work, while nearby oilfields dangled six- figure salaries at high- school dropouts. Witness Alberta’s dark satanic mills.

Albertans might console themselves that the NDP restrained itself from its most radical impulses, no doubt still hopeful that it might yet recover enough popularity to survive into a second term. But the changes already mark some of the most pro- union, anti- business policies in the country. The NDP insists that the “updates and improvements to Alberta’s labour legislation are long overdue,” noting that they haven’t been updated since 1988 when, as labour minister Christina Gray noted, Die Hard was still in theatres. That seems to strike most pundits as a good enough excuse to change it now, but that’s just lazy thinking. If workers’ rights were well protected back then, the passage of three decades won’t have eroded those rights any more than 45 years have eroded the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Thirty years certainly hasn’t eroded the awesomeness of Die Hard one bit.

What the NDP’s really doing isn’t modernizing workplace laws but un- modernizing them. In one particularly pre- industrial flourish, the act would take away democratically held secret-ballot workplace votes for union certifications anywhere labour organizers can get two-thirds of employees to sign a union card. And they’ll get six months to use whatever intimidation, coercion or chicanery they can to collect those signatures, while employers will be barred from making their own case to workers on any downsides of unionization.

The secret- ballot system has modernized labour laws in every province except Ontario and Quebec, but only in Alberta has it returned like a blast from the past. Workers will face a slightly higher hurdle to decertify a union. And the act will entrench the Rand formula, requiring non- unionized employees to pay dues in a union shop — an innovation cooked up back in 1945.

The Notley government has shrewdly focused the conversation on the several changes that sound like motherhood, like protecting workers from being fired for being sick or ( in an unexpected clause) because their child was kidnapped. The message couldn’t be clearer: Business owners are just the kind of rotten people who would cruelly deliver a swift kick out the door to an honest and hardworking employee when she’s suffering.

Of course, anyone who’s actually operated a business ( and good luck finding one in the entire NDP caucus) knows well the hassle that comes with trying to replace a good worker, which for stretches of the last decade in Alberta has been every employer’s nightmare amid severe labour shortages. If you find a worker who says he’s been fired for being away a few days with the flu, you’ve found someone with a long record of more serious work- related concerns.

But those symbolic changes are just the window- dressing for a bill carefully constructed to both increase union bargaining power and union density in a province with the lowest unionization rate in the country, and where rates in the private sector have been shrinking fast.

The new bill doesn’t just open the doors of more businesses — and, now, farms and ranches — for unions to barge into, it gives them bigger clubs to whack businesses in labour disputes by heavily watering down rules about the kinds of tactics strikers can use when picketing businesses. In one unsettling instance, the NDP specifically removes the prohibition of using “unlawful” activities when trying to “persuade” customers not to exercise their rights to patronize a business being struck, leaving it instead, to a labour board of NDP appointees to decide what “wrongful acts” to disallow. The bill also allows, for the first time, strikers to picket their employers’ third- party suppliers. Calling it the “Fair and Family- Friendly Workplaces Act” is a brilliant way to brand what is really a formula for more powerful unions, and more and messier labour disruptions. It’s been more than 40 years since the province was roiled by a wave of bitter and sometimes violent strikes at Gainers meat, Suncor and other Alberta businesses. With all this NDP modernization, it could soon feel like the ’ 80s all over again.