Unifor Embracing the Ontario NDP?

         At last year’s Ontario Federation of Labour Convention Unifor found itself at odds with almost all the other unions present in not favouring unequivocal support of the New Democratic Party (NDP).  Yet, barely more than half a year later, Unifor finds itself effectively in line with those other unions in Ontario because its friends leading Ontario’s governing Liberal Party are tanking in the polls just three weeks before the June 7 provincial election.  Unifor is consequently being forced to come to terms with the fact that presently the Ontario NDP alone can stop the election of a majority government in Ontario led by Tory leader Doug Ford.

         That said a meaningful embrace of the Ontario NDP by Unifor would, in any case, effectively require that a lot of recent history be flushed down an Orwellian memory hole.  Indeed, there is nearly 20 years of this history starting with the CAW’s initial embrace of strategic voting at the end of the 1990s. 

        Some of this history would be very hard to forget such as when CAW President Buzz Hargrove gave a beaming Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin a CAW jacket in front of loudly applauding delegates to a CAW Council meeting.  Less well remembered was the time shortly afterwards when Buzz Hargrove introduced his good friend and then Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty to another loudly cheering crowd at a CAW Council meeting in Port Elgin.  On that occasion Hargrove declared that Dalton McGunity was “doing a great job of giving good government to the people of Ontario.”  Much less well remembered was how the next CAW President Ken Lewenza openly supported right-wing Liberal Sandra Pupatelo in her unsuccessful campaign to succeed Dalton McGunity as Ontario Premier.

        During that long, sordid history of embracing strategic voting and leaders and would be leaders of the Liberal Party the union’s relationship with the New Democratic Party, which had once seemed unbreakable, was strained at best and hostile at worst.  Relations with unions which remained steadfastly loyal to the NDP were similarly problematic largely owing to the warming relationship between the CAW and then Unifor with the Liberal Party.

                                       What Now?

      The question immediately posed by the situation Unifor now faces in Ontario is whether these inconvenient truths about the past two decades can or will disappear down an Orwellian memory hole, particularly within Unifor, and be conveniently forgotten as if they had never existed?  The answer to that question is almost certainly no.

       The legacy of this history is certain to endure because this alignment with the NDP is limited to Ontario, momentary and specific to a situation which will cease to exist after the provincial election on June 7.  The hard truth of the matter is that although Unifor is ditching its Liberal friends in Ontario it is not about to ditch the Liberal Party elsewhere let alone renew the type of close relationship it had with the NDP before the late 1990s.  This is principally because the ongoing love affair between the national leadership of Unifor and the national leadership of the Liberal Party is evidently not being affected by the current, unique political moment in Ontario

       Faced with a politically weak, almost marginalized NDP federally together with the prospect of a 2019 federal contest for power between Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and Andrew Scheer`s Tories Unifor is consequently certain to shun the federal NDP just as Unifor shunned the Ontario NDP until just weeks ago.  The politics of convenience will trump focused political consistency.  Likewise, nary a thought will be given to abandoned ideas about fundamentally changing society that were implicit in the forgotten CAW commitment to what it referred to as social movement unionism and which were never seriously promoted by the union within the NDP.

        That mask is not just off.  It has been cynically discarded.  Opportunism prevails.   Unifor’s objective now is not to fundamentally change society.  Its objective is to be embedded in the corridors of power alongside the representatives of Capital as a “stakeholder``, as it has been in the current, doomed NAFTA negotiations.  That objective was first clearly set out when Unifor was founded.  Achieving it remains the order of the day.  

        Analyzing, exposing and challenging the agenda accompanying that objective will be a monumental task.  But analyzing, exposing and challenging it at every turn is imperative and must be consciously carried out as part of a much larger effort to forge a fighting labour movement in this country.