Federal Tories make pitch for union votes on NDP’s turf
New Democrats call move ‘quite hollow’ as they prepare for April policy conference
OTTAWA—There is a “golden rule” at the Highland Valley Copper mine outside Kamloops, B.C.: don’t mess with lunches or paycheques and never talk politics.
But Kyle Wolff is not on the job site. He’s on the phone, hiking in the hills outside town. So he is free to share his thoughts about the federal Conservatives’ recent overtures to private sector union members like him.
“Honestly, to me, it’s a joke,” says Wolff, 37, an electrician and president of USW Local 7619, the union that represents about
1,000 workers at the mine.
“Put it this way,”
Wolff adds. “When’s the last time a Conservative or a Liberal phoned me to talk about labour? Never.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Wolff supports the New Democratic Party, which was founded as a coalition of farmers and unions. In the nearly 60 years since, it has always claimed to be Canada’s political party for working people.
Yet in recent months, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has sought to challenge that claim.
“When’s the last time a Conservative or a Liberal phoned me to talk about labour? Never.”
KYLE WOLFF
UNION LEADER
His party’s rhetoric has shifted, with O’Toole promising to make rich Canadians “pay their fair share” and praising the benefits of union membership. At the party’s policy convention in March, O’Toole pitched directly to private sector union members, who he said share Conservative values of “hard work, family and community.” And he took aim at his NDP opponents, stating New Democrats “no longer stand up for working Canadians and their families.”
It’s a direct push into traditional NDP territory. But much like Wolff and other union leaders who spoke to the Star, the federal party is not treating it as a serious threat. Ahead of its first policy conference since the 2019 election that is scheduled for April 9 to 11, the NDP is projecting confidence with claims to a pandemic track record that secured more government help for Canadians, and more money to spread the word when the next campaign comes.
“I think it’s quite hollow,” said NDP national director Anne McGrath on O’Toole’s push for union votes.
“It’s not enough just to say these things,” she said. “You have to actually have a history and a record of action that shows where you stand on these issues.”
As the Star’s Alex Boutilier has reported, O’Toole’s team sees a realignment coming in Canadian politics, similar to shifts in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, where working-class voters have moved toward conservative parties.
“This voting group has been really cut adrift in terms of their political allegiances. They don’t really have a strong appetite for the conventional centre-right conservative economic agenda, but at the same time they’re repelled by the movement of the centre-left parties — their embrace of more radical identity politics and political correctness,” a senior Conservative source told the Star in December.
But the NDP and some union leaders argue O’Toole’s record shows the opposite of what his new-found rhetoric implies. For Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, this includes a law passed by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in 2015, which forced unions to disclose more financial information and spending on political activities. (The Liberals repealed it in 2017.)
“He has yet to apologize for the misdeeds of the Harper regime, which he was part of,” Yussuff told the Star. “That would be starting point to see, is he sincere?”
Shayne Fields is president of Unifor Local 222, a union chapter that represents auto manufacturing, transit and other workers in Oshawa, the riding next to the one where O’Toole has been the MP for Durham since 2012. Fields said the Conservatives’ recent talk about union workers has “created quite a buzz” in a city that has seen layoffs at its General Motors plant, but he is skeptical about the outreach until it’s more than just words from O’Toole.
“Will O’Toole stand up for the working class? I don’t see it,” said Fields. “With that said, if we ever did see it, obviously we would give that the respect that it needs.”
Yet despite the skepticism from the NDP and union leaders, polls show the Conservatives can already rely on significant support from rank-andfile members, even if it is consistently lower than their average among the entire population, said Frank Graves, president of EKOS Research.
Graves said his firm privately conducts polls regularly for union clients, and that the overall picture remains similar to a public survey he released ahead of the 2015 election. That poll of 3,382 Canadians found — with a 1.6 per cent margin of error — that about 33 per cent of union members supported the Liberals, 26 per cent intended to vote Conservative, and 23 per cent backed the NDP.
Graves believes the Conservatives are targeting union votes because it is a constituency that typically drags down their national average. Even notching up their union support a few percentage points could make a difference, especially when elections are as close as the one in 2019, when the Liberals won a minority government despite losing the popular vote to the Conservatives.
“If they had performed with the union vote as well as they did with the non-union vote in Canada, they probably would have won the last election,” Graves said. “It’s a shrewd targeting strategy on the part of the Conservatives.”
But Graves added there is no sign yet the strategy is working. “So far it doesn’t look like they’re making much progress on it,” he said.
To keep it that way, the NDP plans to protect its union support as part of its wider electoral strategy, McGrath said. That includes familiar promises to create universal pharmacare and dental care, increase the federal minimum wage and emphasize the NDP’s “actions not words,” she said.
The NDP is also already promising to ban for-profit longterm care and forgive large chunks of student debt.
The party also has a larger war chest this time around. After paying off its 2015 and 2019 campaign debts — which totalled about $10 million — and improving fundraising, McGrath said the party expects to spend $24 million on the next election campaign. That’s more than double the $11 million the NDP spent in 2019.
For Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, this broad strategy is missing something crucial: a clear political pitch directed squarely at the labour movement. And that makes the Conservatives’ new pro-union rhetoric — which he derided as “snake oil” — a real risk to leftleaning parties like the NDP.
“There’s no doubt that the New Democrats have to do more to get back to their roots,” McGowan said.
“They’ve got the substance when it comes to a pro-worker agenda. But that substance is not always reflected in their political messaging, whereas the Conservatives are now trying to adopt messaging that sounds pro-worker, but that’s not reflected at all in their platform or their priorities,” he continued.
“It would be it would be a shame if working Canadians were to buy the Conservative spin and style over the New Democrats’ substance.”
York University professor Steven Tufts, who studies labour and populism, noted right-wing politicians in other countries have also tried to connect with private sector unions amid a wider distrust of elites and economic insecurity that has fuelled populist movements.
To counter that, Tufts said the NDP should revamp its “boring playbook for labour” and propose more aggressive reforms in the next election. That could include a federal minimum wage that is always at least $1 above the lowest provincial minimum wage or new unionization requirements for companies receiving federal contracts, he suggested.
The NDP should “really do some soul-searching at the federal level and come up with a plan that moves labour forward in a more radical way,” Tufts said.
McGrath conceded “political communication can always be improved.” But she made it clear that the NDP is not shaken by O’Toole’s attempt to shunt them aside among union voters.
“Our whole raison d’être, and our campaign and our actions, show where we stand,” she said.