Ford is hours away from winning a second majority. Horwath is hours away from defeat, with the possibility of losing Official Opposition to a Liberal Party led by a tool who may not even win his seat back. How did it go so badly? How did organized labour become so weak and divided?
Another fatal flaw in the 1999 campaign was the divided parliamentary opposition. The NDP were still deeply unpopular only four years after the defeat of Bob Rae's one-term NDP government. Dalton McGuinty was a new untested leader presiding over a Liberal Party that often polled ahead of Harris, but which tried to outflank Harris on the right in the 1995 election.
Labour's divided loyalties in the 1999 are well documented. They stem from the great split of 1993 and the ensuing civil war which destroyed the Days of Action. The public sector unions and the CAW broke from the NDP, while "Pink Paper" unions led by the Steelworkers stuck with Rae. By the end of 1998, some unions were employing "issue-based" advertising campaigns, while the CAW famously endorsed "strategic" voting against Harris. The "Pink Paper" unions openly sabotaged the Days of Action in favour of plowing OFL resources into the NDP. The NDP were mauled in the 1999 election, scoring their lowest popular vote since 1937.
Over twenty years later, the problems have only deepened. The Ontario NDP has proven unwilling to mend the union relationships it destroyed with its legislative "Social Contract" breach of collective agreements. A million public sector workers had their contracts opened up and rollbacks imposed in order to cut $2 billion in spending. This was just the betrayal for labour. Public auto insurance was abandoned. The party flip-flopped on casinos and its Sunday shopping bans. Its own "civil unions" legislation was sunk in a "free vote". Social assistance rates were frozen and "welfare cops" hired.
Unions after Harris
The CAW leadership's love-hate relationship with the NDP was over by 2004 when Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin was given a CAW jacket at the now-closed Electro-Motive Diesel factory in London, Ontario. By 2007, CAW had signed the atrocious sell-out deal with Magna, confirming a serious capitulation to capital. The leadership had turned its back on its founding tradition of militancy and "social unionism". After its merger with CEP in 2013, the CAW leadership and CEP collaborators took charge of the new union, Unifor. Under the erratic and destructive leadership of Jerry Dias, the party moved further into line with the federal Liberals, and in the past year began providing cover for the Ontario PCs.
Many in the teacher union ranks were wooed into the Liberal camp during the Harris years. This was in part a professional conservatism that persisted alongside the rise of a new teacher militancy in the 1990s. However, the tragic sellout of the hugely popular 1997 teachers strike by the union leadership was a massive setback for this emerging tradition. Once the Liberals got into power in 2003, the inevitable betrayal took place with the dictatorial Bill 115. The leaders of the teacher unions, with the exception of ETFO, again sold out teachers in the 2012-13 Bill 115 fight. It was a massive defeat considering the Liberals had a narrow minority and McGuinty had just stepped down with corruption scandals swirling around him. Many teachers moved decisively into the NDP camp, but the entire Bill 115 fight exposed how corrupt some of the union leaders had become in their relationship to the Liberals.
After its big, bloody scraps with the Harris Tories in 1996 and 2002, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union maintained its anti-PC agenda through the 15 Liberal years of 2003-2018. However, its leader Smokey Thomas was erratic and destructive and presided over concession bargaining in OPS. While opposing LCBO privatization, Thomas's OPSEU made no effort to organize private liquor store workers, or combat the brutal two-tier LCBO contract which kept a large majority of LCBO staff in part-time and casual positions. At the infamous Doug Ford press conference in November 2021, featuring Jerry Dias and Smokey Thomas, Thomas was openly supportive of Premier Ford. Dias at least said he had significant points of disagreement with Ford.
Fortunately, Thomas has since retired and now the newly-elected OPSEU leadership is drawn in part from the ranks of its militant college teachers and college workers. These workers have been fighting two-tier contracts and have been organizing part-time college workers in the face of government-employer collusion to bust the union. The new OPSEU leadership has thrown its weight behind the NDP, but the real test is OPS bargaining in 2024-2025. Will it be just another rhetorically progressive public sector union leadership focused on the NDP's fortunes in the 2026 election, or a leadership that is going to fight two-tier contracts, organize the unorganized, and provide public sector muscle to an extra-parliamentary resistance?
The largest public sector union in the province, CUPE, is an incoherent mess. Beyond hospitals and school boards, the principle of "local autonomy" remains a bulwark against coordinated action, notably in the municipal sector where waste management privatization is poised to expand massively with new PC legislation coming online in 2023.
Meanwhile, CUPE's Ontario Council of Hospital Unions has all but knuckled under Bill 124 which holds down public sector wage increases to 1 percent for contracts signed between 2020 and 2022. Despite the law dating to November 2019, and other pieces of legislation accelerating healthcare privatization and profiteering, there are have been no signs of workplace actions or any attempt to generate a political strike in the healthcare sector. The longstanding strike ban in Ontario hospitals and long-term care has not been challenged since the disastrous CUPE hospital workers strike of 1981.
Like virtually every other union in Canada, there appears to be no effort made to enforce the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in favour of the constitutional right to strike. Once again, unions have handed off the responsibility of defeating anti-strike laws to the NDP, instead of taking on that responsibility through the action and power of the membership. With the notable exception of Alberta's AUPE strikers in October 2020, healthcare workers across Canada have not challenged austerity or the persistence of austerity through the pandemic. Healthcare workers had Ford by the balls. All they had to do was squeeze...
Ignore at your peril
The skilled trades, whose unions remain outside OFL/CLC since the split around 1980, remain largely apolitical. But now there is movement in the direction of the PCs with LiUNA leading the charge after the Ontario Liberals screwed LiUNA in a dispute with the Carpenters Union. Few know that Steven Del Duca was part of resolving this dispute in favour of the Carpenters - the very union he worked for prior to his 2012 entry into politics. It's true that the union endorsements of Ford are being declared by union leaders without membership input. It's the same problem with the many more unions endorsing the NDP, or the Liberals.
The movement of some union leaders into the PC camp is still small and marginal, but it is not insignificant. It is also unprecedented for the post-Harris PCs. PC patronage of the skilled trades is out in the open, but Ontario socialists, labour activists in the OFL, and the progressive blob in and around the NDP, have almost entirely neglected these unions and their members. PC restructuring of the despised College of Trades and the awarding of plum titles for friendly union leaders is the patronage that we can see. Below that there is the whiff of corruption, and further below that is the question of organized crime.
The private sector unions in Ontario, notably Unifor, Steelworkers, Teamsters, and UFCW, have all experienced the emergence of strikes against inflation wage cuts and deteriorating conditions during the pandemic. The uptick in private sector strike activity across Ontario since early 2021 has been completely ignored by the Ontario Federation of Labour. No unions inside or outside the OFL have stepped up with any proposals to coordinate contract campaigns against inflation wage cuts - despite the tenacity of the strikes that have unrolled across the private sector, from construction to warehouses, food processing to manufacturing and retail.
While Steel and UFCW openly support the NDP, Unifor clearly does not. Unifor is also outside the OFL/CLC where it used to have outsized influence because of the scale of auto and manufacturing in Ontario. Between 2009 and 2015, Unifor was instrumental in working with pro-NDP Steelworkers and Machinists, and Smokey's OPSEU, to undermine and defeat Sid Ryan's idiosyncratic but often effective leadership of the Ontario Federation of Labour. Facing up to the grim reality of endless dirty and slanderous attacks, Ryan did not run for the OFL presidency in 2015. Unifor's man Chris Buckley took over.
In early 2017, Jerry Dias spearheaded the utterly disastrous Unifor raid on Toronto's TTC union ATU Local 113. With a Rankandfile.ca scoop playing a decisive role, the raid was foiled and the collusion of the CLC leadership, led by Unifor's Hassan Yussuff, was exposed. In early 2018, a second Unifor raid in Toronto exploded, this time with support from some senior staff of the UNITE HERE Local 75 hotel union. As the raid was publicized, Dias and a whipped national leadership announced their immediate withdrawal from the CLC, and by extension the OFL.
With Unifor already prepping the hotel raid and CLC exit, the NDP loyalists in Ontario labour recommitted the OFL to supporting the NDP at the November 2017 OFL convention. With the Liberals low in the polls and the Ontario PC Party riding high, the NDP's labour loyalists saw the opportunity emerging for the NDP to win the next election with an anti-Liberal, anti-PC wave vote. The NDP's perennial efforts at conservatizing its public relations for electoral triangulation were now being rewarded with the circumstances that would make it possible.
The Ontario NDP came close to winning on a mediocre platform, and within a week of voting day, it looked like they would. But a concerted opposition counter-attack from multiple quarters succeeded and Ford won the day.
The Power of None
After three years of activity, the OFL got off its ass to unroll an "Activist Assembly" in March 2022 with the goal of building May Day rallies which were pitched as possibly influencing the June election. The miniscule size of the local rallies exposed the degree to which the OFL commanded few supporters, and simply did not understand that labour councils could not build significant actions with two months notice. With hardly a rally outside Toronto topping a hundred people, well-framed photos covered-up the fact that Toronto's rally was generously 3,000 people.
Three years earlier, over 20,000 marched in Toronto against Ford's education cuts. A few days earlier, 100,000+ high school students conducted an unprecedented walkout. This high point of extra-parliamentary opposition really started in February 2019 with smaller, persistent and disruptive protests by families opposing Ford's cuts to autism supports in schools. Their example was a spark that ignited popular anger.
The OFL's post-election strategy also unrolled at the beginning of 2019 which raised hopes that serious preparations were being made for an extra-parliamentary opposition. The timing was certainly fortunate. The "Power of Many" campaign unrolled with mass meetings held at labour council halls in numerous localities across Ontario. The Power of Many meetings drew in hundreds, but union member energies and contact information was funneled into the NDP. The strategy was laid out as a plan to put the NDP into power in 2022. Significant urban centres with traditional union strength did not even have Power of Many meetings. It was explained that the Power of Many was touring cities where it was believed the NDP could win PC seats in the 2022 election three years away.
The electoral strategy of the Power of Many was reflected in the complete neglect of building a movement on the streets and in the workplaces against Ford. The major immediate task of the Power of Many called for local rallies on June 7. The OFL encouraged "local initiative" with little direction or support. June 7 was an embarrassing flop of miniscule actions while Ford's popularity was in the shitter, with the NDP and Liberals contending for the lead. The rallies were not unlike the dispersed and small showing three years later on May Day. The spring of 2019 was the lowest level of PC support during Ford's entire first term. It was capped off by Doug Ford himself facing a colossal avalanche of boos at the Toronto Raptors championship ceremony. It seemed the tide was turning against Doug Ford, but conscious organization was required to harness the new mood.
The Power of Many's strategy document was first distributed in January 2019. It contained a schedule of activity that blocked out June 7 through to October as the "federal election". There was no follow-up actions or events scheduled for the Power of Many. The last Power of Many meetings happened in early April - as the teachers and students marched in their tens of thousands. Then the Power of Many was never heard from again. When the prospect of a 55,000-strong strike by CUPE school board workers emerged in September 2019, the Power of Many was nowhere to be found. The federal election was the priority, not the construction of a labour movement capable of resisting Ford and hammering his business class base.
Labour's Pandemic Defeat
By the time the pandemic hit in March 2020, the Power of Many was forgotten. The hollowing out of union power was evidenced in the total defeat of labour in the first crucial weeks of the pandemic. On the shopfloor, health and safety work refusals were sporadic and isolated at the local level. Any kind of effort to revitalize shopfloor power through coordinated work refusals was ignored. No effort was made to organize non-union essential workers. No action was taken on the shopfloor to fight the grocery cartel on repealing pandemic pay. Regardless of mass illness and even death, workers in Ontario and across the country marched back into workplaces with no encouragement to fight or resist. Union muscle has atrophied, muscle memory forgotten. Years of business unionism, often wrapped in progressive rhetoric, has hollowed out our unions.
On the policy front, the private sector giants UFCW, Steelworkers, and Unifor collaborated directly with the anti-union scumbags at the CFIB by endorsing a letter delivered by Jagmeet Singh to Justin Trudeau pressing for a 75 percent wage subsidy. The opportunity to press for long overdue Employment Insurance reforms was abandoned in favour of what quickly became a massive corrupt slush fund for the business class. It was deliberately misnamed the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy. It wasn't a wage subsidy. It was a payroll subsidy, and it padded out profits, went to executive bonuses, and helped boost shareholder dividends.
Meanwhile, CERB was unrolled but it was always going to be short-lived. CERB was nevertheless hyped by Singh as the arrival of a Universal Basic Income. This claim proved to be more misleading NDP PR serving the Trudeau Liberals.
When unions called for paid sick days at the start of the pandemic, action was limited to strong words. Singh, with direction from Horgan's minority NDP government in BC, mollified these demands by declaring in May 2020 he had secured paid sick days for all Canadian workers. The resulting program, the Canada Recovery Sickness Benefits, proved to be a piece of shit when it was finally unrolled in October 2020.
The battle for paid sick days shifted back to the provincial level where in Ontario the campaign was finally taken up by the Ontario NDP. Buried in their paid sick days bill put forward in late 2020 was a provision to fund paid sick days through public money. All of a sudden the CFIB and Chamber of Commerce supported paid sick days, after championing Doug Ford's repeal of two paid sick days in late 2018. Ford's simple majority squashed paid sick days legislation again.
Lacking in the paid sick days campaign was the involvement of union members and the incorporation of paid sick days into workplace demands. Instead, it was medical professionals, public health officials (aka: politicians) and eventually mainstream media pundits who pushed openly and publicly for paid sick days. Unions made no attempt to bring the demands into workplaces and organize actions around the demand.
Opportunities were also missed. When Fenner Dunlop workers in Bracebridge were locked out for five months, defence of their paid sick days was a central point of contention. Neither the union nor the paid sick days activists connected their campaigns. In some ways, this was rock bottom: a movement for paid sick days that did not include workers, only white collar professionals. Still, paid sick days got a hearing within the NDP, although this may have something to do with the constituency campaigning for them.
Labour calls the manager
In Ontario and across much of the country, union leaders have only waged a war of words against politicians during the pandemic. The rampant corruption of pandemic slushfunds for business has largely been ignored by labour and the NDP. Business bankruptcies even declined, but again, the business base of the Ontario PCs was left unscathed by the endless flood of rhetorical warfare from the OFL, its affiliates, and the NDP. The pampered business class, facing no opposition from labour and the left. Sections broke further right and provided much of the backbone to a new far right.
The anti-lockdown dissidents on the right barnstormed the province in late 2020 through 2021 with little resistance. Their actions grew and they built a base that would later deliver impressive results for the PPC in the 2021 federal election, and pull off the blockade of the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor. Their efforts, including experimentation with new political parties, are obvious lessons for Ontario labour socialists.
The labour response to the freaks protesting in front of hospitals was dealt with through the Ontario NDP. The problem could have been resolved rather easily, but organizing a few hundred union members to settle the question at a hospital entrance was not on the table. Prefiguring the federal NDP's support for the Emergencies Act against the Freedom Convoy, the Ontario NDP called for a ban on protests in front of hospitals. It was all about calling the manager. The manager was and is Doug Ford.
This is the appalling state of organized labour in Ontario and the resistance to the Ford government over the past four years. Labour's political strategy is increasingly fragmented, and the "left" labour position of supporting the NDP has not only failed, but only ensured more defeats.
Notes on new directions
An independent path has to be forged. The pockets of resistance and small networks do exist for such a project to begin. It's already beginning. But we can't get anywhere if we can't see the how and why of organized labour in Ontario getting completely fucking rinsed over the last four years. A focus on hammering the bosses is the absolute priority.
In private sector unions, this means coordinating contract fights against inflation and two-tier contracts. In the non-union private sector, this means organizing new fighting unions. In the heavily-unionized public sector, this means a radical new direction of preparing to defy anti-strike and wage suppression laws.
At the ballot box, this means the development of an independent labour left, starting local, coordinating across localities, but avoiding the mistake of launching a new provincial party without establishing several solid local organizations.