Not your grandma’s NDP

This ain’t your grandma’s NDP. If there were any last
lingering doubts on that score, Darrell Dexter erased them Monday with
one simple response to a question about whether an NDP government would
repeal 1979 legislation that has made it virtually impossible for
unions to organize workers at any of Michelin Tire’s three Nova Scotia
plants.

Said Dexter: “I have no interest in fighting battles that happened
30 years ago.”

To understand the seismic shift that blandly unrevealing sentence
actually represents, it’s worth a brief history lesson.

During the late 1960s, then-Tory premier Robert Stanfield lured the
giant French tire manufacturer to backwater Nova Scotia with a
too-good-to-refuse goody basket of government grants, low-interest
loans and tax incentives. Over the next decade, successive Liberal and
Conservative governments not only opened the province’s treasury for
the company but also enacted a series of ever more lapdog labour laws
specifically to keep Michelin’s finicky owners—once rightly described
as “anti-union by instinct and paternalistic by practice”—from simply
swallowing our $80 million-plus public investment and disappearing to
even more welcoming, less worker-friendly jurisdictions elsewhere.

In 1979, the then-Tory labour minister Ken Streatch introduced what
would become known as the Michelin Bill. That infamous emergency
amendment to the province’s trade union act represented, in the words
of a labour leader of the day, “a deal hatched under a slimy rock by a
bunchof vipers.”

At the time, the United Rubber Workers’ Union was nearing the
conclusion of a brutish three-year, million-dollar campaign to organize
employees at Michelin’s Granton, N.S., plant. Workers there, in fact,
had already cast their ballots in a certification vote when the
government stepped in to make the outcome moot. Its new law—which not
only ran counter to a provincial labour relations board ruling but was
also written to apply retroactively—required the union to win the
support of a majority of workers at both of the company’s then-two
provincial plants in order to be recognized as the bargaining agent for
either of them.

Not coincidentally—nothing was subtle back then—the day after
the government introduced the made-in-Michelin bill, its beaming
development minister called a press conference to announce that
Michelin would build a third plant in the province and expand its two
existing operations—all with, of course, more government financial
assistance. Tic tac toe. Quid pro quo.

Perhaps not surprisingly, repealing that legislation, which the
Canadian Labour Congress once rightly condemned as “a deplorable sham
of democracy,” has been a continuing touchstone for both trade
unionists and their political allies in the provincial NDP ever
since.

Until now.

Does it matter anymore?

In practical terms, no.

Given all the many and various more pressing problems any new
provincial government is bound to smack up against, changing
decades-old legislation to make it slightly easier for unions—who
haven’t exactly been chomping at the bit—to organize workers—who
seem, at best, lukewarm to the idea—at a company that not only pays
its workers well in places where jobs are scarce but also is one of the
province’s largest, if least loyal, employers…hardly seems a
priority.

Les Holloway, the current regional director for the Canadian Auto
Workers, in fact, downplayed its relevance, not only making the quite
logical point that his union has been absorbed with more pressing
issues (like the fate of the Canadian auto industry) but also adding
that “we don’t own the NDP.”

Symbolically? On that level, Dexter’s declaration is one more
important telling sign the new, middle-of-the-mainstream Nova Scotia
NDP is no longer your grandma’s NDP.

Will that turn out to be a good or a bad thing? That will depend
less on whether the party promises to repeal decades-old,
now-mostly-beside-the-point legislation and much more on how the party
responds the next time a powerful corporation like Michelin comes
demanding it rewrite the law for its benefit.

On that score, the jury is still out.

Stephen Kimber will provide The Coast’s provincial
election coverage. Email him at stephenk@thecoast.ca.

This article appears in May 14-20, 2009.