Labour Flies on the Radar of the Conservatives

Oct 6, 2012

Labour Flies on the Radar of the Conservatives

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With the Harper government’s history of undermining bargaining rights and passing employer-friendly legislation, it should come as no surprise that two important events speaking to censorship and an anti-union agenda occurred within days of one another.

The first concerns the RCMP forcing a plane to land for carrying a Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) banner critical of Prime Minister Harper. The second is regarding a private member’s bill proposed by Nepean-Carleton MP Pierre Poilièvre that would allow workers who may disagree with their union’s political stances and campaigns to opt out of paying union dues.

These events are a continuation of two political wars that the Conservative government has been waging for years: one against its critics, and one against organized labour. If PSAC has earned a place of special loathing, it is because the union is at the forefront of both wars as a prominent critic of the government and the country’s largest public sector union.

On Sept. 1, pilot Gian Piero Ciambella took to the skies of the National Capital Region to display the PSAC sponsored “Stephen Harper Nous Déteste.ca” banner, French for “Stephen Harper Hates Us.ca.” Either url leads to websites set up by PSAC as part of their We Are All Affected campaign, which highlights the effects the federal budget cuts will have on communities across Canada.

The plane and its banner made previous appearances at several festivals and parades across Quebec in late August, where it drew a great deal of interest, according to Ciambella. But less than two hours into his flight to bring the message to Gatineau’s Hot Air Balloon Festival, he was ordered by the RCMP to land and submit to questioning.

The RCMP first admitted that NAV Canada, the national corporate air navigation service, at no time detected a violation of the closed airspace over Parliament Hill and the prime minister’s residence.

Indeed, a different motivation was hinted at by an RCMP sergeant’s suggestion that Ciambella’s banner may constitute hate speech. The admission that Ciambella’s flight path was completely legal was later retracted, however, and replaced with the claim that officers on Parliament Hill thought they had seen the plane within the no-fly zone.

According to Carl Vallée, a press secretary for Harper, stopping the plane “was an operational decision by the RCMP, not a political one.” But the incident bears an uncomfortable similarity with two previous instances of governmental censorship.

The first is the Conservatives’ attempt to muzzle British MP George Galloway by barring him from entering Canada, conflating his participation in an aid convoy with the funding of so-called Palestinian terrorists.

The second is their attempt to silence Toronto artist Franke James, who was awarded a grant to take her art exhibit abroad, but later had it revoked due to the art’s critical stance on Canadian environmental policies. The government was not forthcoming with this rationale; James discovered the political motivation only after filing an access-to-information request.

While the Conservative government’s war on critics has been a relatively quiet affair, the parallel war on organized labour has been anything but. So much so that journalist Lawrence Martin sees it as a deliberate public relations strategy on the Conservatives’ part, a kind of right-wing campaign against labour unions and their supporters.

Labour Minister Lisa Raitt has legislated workers back to work in several labour disputes since the Conservatives gained a majority, including strikes and lockouts at Canada Post, Air Canada and Canadian Pacific Railway.

In the case of Canada Post, the government not only trampled on the workers’ rights, as the Canadian Union of Postal Workers charges in its lawsuit against the back-to-work legislation, but went further in support of management by imposing even worse wages than were discussed in negotiations.

This aspect of Conservative Party policy has become so routine it is almost relied upon by corporations. It has become commonly referred to as a pre-emptive war on labour. But Poilièvre’s private member’s bill would go much further should it be passed into law.

It has been compared to right-to-work legislation, which has devastated labour’s ability to organize in states across the US, to the point where only about 12 percent of American workers have a union, compared to Canada’s relatively robust unionization rate of 30 percent.

The government’s twin wars on critics and labour ignore the fundamental wisdom of the Rand Formula, named after Canadian Supreme Court Justice Ivan Rand. Rand ruled in 1946 that while workers do have the right to formally dissociate themselves from their workplace’s union, they still owe it their dues because of the role it plays in securing better wages and conditions for them and their fellow workers.

This is the kind of wisdom that not just Mr. Poilièvre, but all Canadians should remember, especially in these times of growing inequality, government austerity and attacks on workers’ rights.

This article first appeared in the Leveller, Vol. 5, No. 1.