Oshawa, Ont., home of General Motors’ headquarters in Canada and one of the country’s most unionized cities, once was a safe NDP seat.
As a young reporter getting a first taste of political reporting, the question in the early 1970s was not whether Ed Broadbent would win but by how much.
He had wrestled the seat away from a former Conservative cabinet minister in 1968 and for the next six elections, racked up victories by thousands of votes.
The Union of Auto Workers provided money and the ground troops. It was, it is, a union town.
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Since 2004, Colin Carrie has been the Conservative MP racking up victories by thousands of votes.
So it is in many of the unionized forestry and mining constituencies of the British Columbia interior where the Reform party and now the Conservative party have been winning seats handily since 1993.
So it is now in many of the industrialized, unionized suburban ridings around Toronto where the Conservatives cleaned up May 2.
And so it is in Ottawa where the Conservatives won seats in ridings where unionized public servants and their families make up a significant portion of the electorate despite opposition predictions of government downsizing.
So what to make, then, of the conventional wisdom among opposition MPs, Conservative critics and many in the media that the Conservative government reaction to the Canada Post lockout was back-to-work legislation that clearly showed a party ideologically on the side of the boss and contemptuous of the worker?
It was a common theme during the marathon filibuster/debate over the Canada Post back-to-work bill last weekend in the House of Commons.
Workers beware, said the NDP. With the Conservatives in a majority, union rights will be trampled and bosses will rule.
Montreal Liberal Denis Coderre captured the argument perfectly.
“We have really reached a low point if the minister of labour said today that it does not really matter how things will turn out,” he thundered.
“Our government is siding with the employers. We have a minister who has just completely denied collective rights and workers’ right.”
In truth, the back-to-work bill was slanted in favour of Canada Post, limiting wage increases to less than the employer had offered.
And no doubt unionized public service jobs will be lost in Ottawa as the Conservatives try to fulfill their promise to tame the deficit.
Union leaders, a key part of the opposition New Democratic Party support base, will tell anyone who will listen that the Conservatives are anti-union, anti-worker.
Yet unionized workers clearly vote for Conservatives in droves. Based on the riding splits, it would not be surprising to find that more union members vote Conservative than NDP.
How can this be?
Broadbent once explained the loss of Oshawa by arguing that once union members win salaries that make them among a community’s highest-paid workers, they become conservative and maybe Conservative.
Or maybe it is simply that like pro- Canadian Wheat Board prairie farmers who vote Conservative, voters do not always vote for their own economic or ideological self-interest.
Whatever the reason, it is difficult to paint the Conservatives as anti-labour when so many of their ridings are strong union ridings.
