Conservative War On Unions: As Public Service Job Cuts Mount, Tories Distract, Destabilize Critics

The war drums of a Tory-led campaign against Big Labour beat louder each day, with calls to make union dues optional and financial disclosure mandatory.

Behind the rhetoric about “union bosses” and “transparency” lies a strategy, political observers say, that stokes controversies and throws up red herrings in order to force key opponents on the defensive — in this case, Canada’s labour movement and the NDP.

“The whole approach is not to push your guy but to totally demean and to discredit and to vilify your opponent so that the only person left standing in the ring is your own person,” said Nelson Wiseman, a political scientist at University of Toronto.

The Conservatives are “Canadian masters” of the strategy forged by Republican strategist Karl Rove during the George W. Bush years, Wiseman said. They used it against Liberal leaders in the past and have extended it to other interest groups, such as unions, he said.

This fall, two anti-union proposals are making waves on Parliament Hill at a time when the Public Service Alliance of Canada and the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada would rather be talking about Ottawa’s deep cuts to the federal workforce. (In the past few months, more than 26,000 government workers have received “affected notices” telling them their jobs could be on the chopping block. The federal government said this spring that it would slash some 19,000 positions by 2015).

The impact of those cuts on services is unknown: Ottawa refuses to fully reveal who or what is getting cut. Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page has decried the secrecy, suggesting the system has been “totally undermined.”

Yet amid the flurry of job notices, PSAC, PIPSC and other labour groups are bracing for Conservative MP Russ Hiebert’s private member’s bill, C-377, which is up for debate at the Commons’ Standing Committee on Finance this autumn.

If passed, the bill would require all private- and public-sector unions in Canada to publicly disclose any transaction or payment over $5,000, including contracts, donations and investments. Unions would be forced to disclose who got paid, with names and addresses detailed, along with the purpose of each expense.

Investors who manage the unions’ billion-dollar pension funds would also have to disclose hundreds of thousands of transactions, though Hiebert has indicated that he will narrow the bill’s scope amid privacy concerns. He was also lobbied by the investment community.

Original Article
Source: huffington post
Author: Althia Raj