(TORONTO) Tim Hudak’s promise to end all provincial government subsidies to business, in the name of ending so-called “corporate welfare,” would destroy Ontario’s chances of winning new auto investments that are crucial to the future of several Ontario auto communities, warns CAW National President Ken Lewenza.

 

“The puritan Conservative position against subsidies is driven by ideology, not economic reality,” Lewenza said inToronto. “If enacted, this promise would mean we’ll never receive another major auto investment in this province.”

 

Hudak’s pledge to end all business subsidies appears on page 15 of the Conservatives’ “Changebook” platform document.

 

In capital-intensive, globally mobile industries like auto and aerospace, it is a near-universal practice for host governments to provide a range of incentives to attract new investments (including capital grants, infrastructure subsidies, and training subsidies).

 

In Ontario for the last decade, every major capital project by global automakers has received major financial support from both the federal and the Ontario governments. Typically, each level of government kicks in about 10 per cent of the capital cost of the new investment, for a combined subsidy of around 20 per cent. This has been the practice both at new “greenfield” sites (such as Toyota’s new plant in Woodstock) and for the retooling of existing factories.

 

Several major Ontario auto facilities will require major retooling within the term of the next Ontario government, including plants in Brampton, Oakville, Ingersoll, Oshawa and Windsor.

 

“Without significant participation by both the provincial and federal governments, not one of those crucial projects will go ahead,” Lewenza said. “Tens of thousands of auto jobs in Ontario will be jeopardized if a Hudak government puts naïve philosophical convictions ahead of concrete support for this vital industry.”

 

“Of course, we’d all rather see companies investing in this province out of a sense of social responsibility,” Lewenza said. “But that’s not how most industries work anymore. You have to have money on the table, in order to play in the game.”

 

Government participation is all the more important today, Lewenza noted, in light of actions by competing jurisdictions (including the U.S. and Mexico, which also pay large investment subsidies), the over-valued Canadian currency, and the need for auto companies to invest in new environmental technology and other innovations.

 

About 95,000 Ontarians currently work in auto assembly and components manufacturing. About 9000 new auto jobs have been regained in the province since June 2009 – the worst point of the global financial crisis. (Source: Statistics CanadaCatalogue 281-0023). Government participation in rescuing GM and Chrysler, and supporting a range of recently-announced investments (by companies like Ford, Magna, and Toyota), has been essential to that partial rebound.

 

A comprehensive comparison of the election platforms of the three major parties in Ontario’s election has revealed an enormous fiscal “hole” in the Conservative platform, that will inevitably result in dramatic reductions in public spending if that party wins the October 6 election.

 

The report, released by Hugh Mackenzie with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), added up the value of the campaign promises (for tax cuts and new spending programs) made by the three parties, and compared those to their corresponding plans to pay for those promises.

 

It found that the Conservative platform is by far the most aggressive of the three parties, featuring promises that would cost $4.4 billion per year by 2015-16. That’s as much as the value of the promises in the Liberal and NDP platforms put together. Nearly 80% of the cost of the Conservative platform goes to tax cuts.

 

Most dangerous, the Conservatives rely solely on spending cuts to pay for these promises, yet they have not explained where most of those cuts will come from. Mackenzie’s calculations show that unspecified additional spending cuts worth $4.1 billion in 2015-16 (and a cumulative $10 billion over the next four years) will be required to make the Conservative plan “add up.”

 

Mackenzie concludes, “There’s a $10 billion hole in his budget that can only be filled by public service cuts that he isn’t prepared to tell you about right now.”

 

The full report can be downloaded from the CCPA here:

http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/platform-costing-and-politics-fiscal-policy-ontario

 

by Ken Lewenza

 

Tim Hudak has never met a problem that can’t be blamed on unions. Worried about the deficit? Blame unions. Concerned about lack of business investment? Blame unions. Don’t like our election financing rules? Blame unions. When in doubt, point the finger at unions.

 

The Conservative leader was at it again recently with remarks in Cornwall about Ontario’s apprenticeship system, which he says is outdated and ineffective. The source of the problem? You guessed it: he blames “union bosses” and the vested interest of unionized workplaces.

 

Pointing fingers at unions on this issue is especially galling. After all, skilled trades training fell out of favour in recent decades with many employers and education officials, who were perhaps biased against the “blue collar” nature of the work. Yet there is no single constituency in society that fought harder to preserve and revitalize the apprenticeship system than the union movement.

 

The CAW has been warning for years about the coming demographic crunch in our skilled trade workforce. We’ve made apprenticeships an issue at countless bargaining tables – not just traditional manufacturing and transportation applications, but also in service sector workplaces (like hospitals, hotels, and universities). We’ve pushed employers hard to invest now in training and apprenticeships, so we aren’t caught short down the road when today’s skilled tradespeople start to retire in big numbers.

 

Most employers, however, would rather simply put off that cost to another day. The union can’t overcome employers’ short-sightedness alone, through collective bargaining. We need government to provide necessary fiscal supports, set clear effective standards, and push employers to do their bit to build the workforce we’ll need in the future.

 

Mr. Hudak’s credibility in attacking a system that he says was “designed for the 1970s” is painfully thin. Remember, it was his government in charge of apprenticeships from 1995 through 2003. Far from taking the initiative to modernize the system then, the Conservatives actually went backwards. The Harris government’s Apprenticeship Certification Act (Bill 55) in 1998, with Mr. Hudak’s support, deregulated and diluted apprenticeship standards, justified by faith that private employers would ensure sufficient tradespeople (with sufficient credentials) on their own.

 

But trusting the private sector to do it all failed miserably. So finally, in 2009, the Ontario College of Trades and Apprenticeships Act was implemented to strengthen the whole system. A new body, the Ontario College of Trades, is now working to ensure that employers and colleges are rigorous in the quality of training, and that the flow of skilled trades graduates is in close accord with the future needs of industry.

 

Mr. Hudak’s emphasis on diluting the ratio of apprenticeships to journeypersons (to 1-to-1 in all industries, according to his proposal) is a red herring. 80 per cent of the 157 apprenticeable trades in Ontario have no such ratios at all. Applying a 1-to-1 cookie-cutter rule across the whole system is wrong. And diluting standards in an effort to push more apprentices through a second-rate system, with no guarantees regarding either the quality of training or the prospects of a job at the end of it, is no way to build a “modern” system.

 

Remember, the value of a skilled trades ticket is that it proves the worker has the comprehensive, all-round training to safely and effectively handle any situation that arises in their field. That comprehensive knowledge is essential to both the efficiency and the safety of modern work. Cost-cutting employers are tempted to say, “Don’t bother … you’ll never need to know that anyway.” That’s why we need strong standards (which Mr. Hudak dismisses as “red tape”) to make sure tradespeople have all the appropriate knowledge. Otherwise the value of the ticket is depreciated, and the perceived need to have a ticketed tradesperson do the job dissipates – to the detriment both of the quality of the work performed, and the opportunity for Ontarians to have good jobs.

 

Mr. Hudak surely wants surgeons and other medical professionals to have all the appropriate skills – not just the ones they use most of the time. The same logic applies to apprentices. Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that lives depend on the quality of training for skilled trades workers.

 

Other successful manufacturing exporters – like Germany and Japan – have acknowledged the importance of skilled trades training, and integrated it as an asset in their national economic strategies. Close cooperation among colleges, unions, and employers is necessary to ensure that apprentices get the right training and a good job at the end of it all.

 

The Ontario College of Trades is a valuable, long-overdue initiative that will play an important role in strengthening our system. In fact, it is aimed at repairing the damage that is still the legacy of the Conservatives’ last term in office. We need bridge-building, not finger-pointing, to strengthen this essential pillar of our post-secondary education system.

 

Ken Lewenza is national president of the Canadian Auto Workers union .

 

Ontarians have identified health care as one of their top priorities of the election campaign and the stakes could not be higher. We all remember what happened last time Tim Hudak was in government. As Mike Harris` parliamentary assistant to the health minister, Hudak presided over mass layoffs of nurses in the late 1990s, causing thousands of nurses to leave the province to work elsewhere or leave the profession entirely. Hudak’s PC government compared nurses to hula-hoop workers and then closed 28 hospitals across the province, leaving Ontarians struggling to find care when they needed it most.

 

It`s obvious that Tim Hudak hasn’t learned anything from this terrible time. When he wasn`t busy misleading Ontarians with false data and hand-drawn graphs, Hudak presented us with a health care plan that falls right into his $14 billion budget shortfall. As much as he might argue otherwise, that means more service cuts to our most important health care programs.

 

Ontario has seen great progress in the last 8 years that focus on prevention and treatment, and the proof is in the numbers. Wait times for a number of medical procedures and surgeries have improved to become the best in Canada. 1.3 million more people living in this province now have access to a family doctor. And our bright young students are now making healthier eating choices at school.

 

We know that the old Harris / Hudak gang thinks of nurses. Recently, 11,500 new nurses have been hired in Ontario and been given better tools than ever to provide great treatment throughout their career. The Nursing Graduate Guarantee program allows nurses to work full time within six months of graduation and the Late Career Nurse Initiative helps nurses 55 years and older stay on the job longer by offering opportunities to mentor other nurses and teach patients. This type of support for our front-line health care providers is what will ensure that Ontario`s treatment remains world-class. Let’s work to make sure we don’t give Hudak another opportunity to fire nurses and close hospitals.

 

Investing in education for all young Ontarians is a commitment that pays off now and for many years to come. Unfortunately, Tim Hudak has been busy cooking up a bait-and-switch to cut taxes without slashing education. His vow to “restrain spending in a responsible way that protects health and education” and even increase education spending sounds good – until we remember that his old boss Mike Harris’ Common Sense Revolution once ‘guaranteed’ “full funding for health care, law enforcement, and education spending in the classroom.” After booting nurses to the curb, Hudak and Harris slashed funding to Ontario universities by 25 per cent. Even after the economy rebounded, the Progressive Conservative’s near-sightedness meant spending stayed flat and by the end of the century, Ontario’s per capita university funding rank had fallen to tenth out of 10 provinces. What Tim Hudak still has trouble realising is that education leads to a more prosperous and productive Ontario in the future and is the best possible investment we can make.

 

Since those dark days, incredible progress has been made in Ontario for students of all ages. Full-day kindergarten, which has been shown to increase small group activities, social interactions, and overall student performance, will be available to every Ontario kindergarten age child by 2014-15; last year, 81 per cent of students graduated with a high school diploma, 13 percentage points higher more than in 2003-04; and there are 200,000 students going on to postsecondary education than in 2003, with a new tuition grant that will save families $1,600 per student in university and $730 per student in college, annually.

 

Investing in education is about long term prosperity, not the short term vote pandering that we’ve seen from Tim Hudak. All Ontarians deserve to live in a province where progressive programs, proper funding, and full support for our educators will ensure that we remain a leader within Canada and the around the world. Our families deserve it.

 

It has become painfully obvious that Tim Hudak’s changebook is not only short on dollars and sense, but also full of false partisan spin. According to a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report, every graph in the platform booklet has reflected “a consistent willingness to bend the statistical truth,” “mislead the reader,” and in at least three instances present explicitly false data. It’s an unfortunate reality that the Progressive Conservatives would need to rely on outright number manipulation to make their fiscal plan palatable to Ontarians.

 

Not surprisingly, changebook glosses over the $12 billion gap between the taxes a Hudak government would cut and the revenues it would bring in. Hudak’s pledge to increase spending while cutting taxes fails to mention where all the additional revenue would come from. His promise to find savings of two cents on the dollar every year on government spending does not even cover the annual rate of inflation, ensuring that he has no plan to balance the budget. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since Hudak cooked up this plan on a napkin at one of Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s barbecues. Ford’s hollow words about “ending the gravy train” by finding efficiencies without cutting services are an all-too-current example of a bait-and-switch and Hudak’s fiscal plan relies on the same hocus-pocus numbers. Even Hudak’s candidates are echoing Ford and Tea Party Republicans, relying on the same empty slogan: ‘We don’t have an income problem, we have a spending problem.’ With Tim Hudak’s changebook, what we have is a $12 billion budget gap that will bring us back to the Harris-Hudak era of devastating budget cuts to our most important services.

 

The evidence is in plain view. Hudak has been very clear that he will refuse to continue uploading billions of dollars of costs from municipalities. Mayors are worried, and taxpayers should be too: after the $3 billion worth of costs downloaded onto municipal budgets by Mike Harris and Ernie Eves, taxpayers know that under a Tim Hudak government, they can expect either brutal spending cuts to valued programs or a huge increase on their property tax bill.

 

Tim Hudak has big changes planned for Ontario’s labour laws. Rooted in his desire for revenge against the union-supported Working Families Coalition and his ideological incompatibility with unionization, these changes will negatively impact the labour community. Chief amongst these proposed reforms is to alter the method through which workers become unionized in a manner which makes the process more burdensome. Rather than being forthright with his intentions, however, Hudak cloaks this attack on workers’ rights in the language of democracy by making the seemingly gracious promise to “give all individuals the right to a secret ballot in certification votes.” The way Hudak tell it, he simply wants to make Ontario’s labour laws more democratic.
 
To understand just how undemocratic Hudak’s pledge is requires some familiarity with labour law as it pertains to union certification. Union certification is the process through which a workplace becomes unionized. Certifications come in two varieties; card- and vote-based. In a card-based system, workers seeking to unionize pledge their support by signing union membership cards. If the union is able to garner the employees’ support it can apply for a certification with the Ontario Labour Relations Board, which is granted so long as at least 55 percent of workers, a clear majority, support the union. In a vote-based system these initial steps remain, but even after a clear majority of workers pledge their support for the union the workplace is not yet certified. Rather, the Ontario Labour Relations Board then orders a certification vote to be conducted, and the union is certified only if a second majority votes again in support of the union.
 
Co-opting the language of democracy, the PCs frame themselves as enfranchising workers with the right to vote. To the contrary, this measure undermines their democratic right to freedom of association. During the days between when the certification vote is ordered and when the vote takes place employers often engage in a range of tactics to pressure workers into voting against the union. A study by Karen J. Bentham of eight Canadian jurisdictions which have experimented with vote-based certification found that 88 percent of employers engaged in actions to limit employees’ communication with union representatives and their co-workers, while 68 percent directly communicated with employees about the application. The most common employer tactics are captive audience meetings where employees are forced to attend anti-union presentations by management. Threats of layoffs if the workplace unionizes and the firing of key union supporters are more common than one might expect. Egregious violations of workers’ rights are well documented by the Ontario Labour Relations Board.

 
Card-based certification was first introduced in Ontario by PC Premier Leslie Frost and was supported by successive PC, Liberal and NDP governments from 1950 until 1995. It was not until the reign of Mike Harris that card-based certification was taken away from Ontario workers. The Harris regime waged a broad-based range of attacks on workers’ rights, freezing minimum wage, drastically cutting the Ministry of Labour, firing workplace safety inspectors and implementing a variety of initiatives to undermine unions. After taking office in 2003, the McGuinty government reversed most of the Harris initiatives with Bill 144. Citing the unique nature of the construction industry, which is characterized by its transient, seasonal, multi-site nature, card-based certification was returned only to the building trades. This was justified on the grounds that these characteristics make it much easier for employers to dismiss workers who are trying to unionize in the name of a downturn, and because the sheer logistics of having workers at multiple sites across Ontario makes conducting a certification vote problematic. Bill 144 was a meaningful step in the right direction from the regressive Harris labour policies. Nonetheless, if a change were to be made it ought to be to return to the longstanding status quo and extend card-based certification to all sectors of the economy, not to wretch it from those fortunate enough to still have this fair and balanced system.
 

Advocates of vote-based certification make their case using a flawed political election analogy. Union certification elections are unlike political elections and this analogy is faulty because the structural imbalance of power between management and employees undermines their free choice during certification votes. Employers control workers’ very means of survival. Just imagine a political election where one party employs the entire electorate, has unfettered access to them for 40 hours per week and the vote takes place on their property. This might be up to the standards of the pseudo-elections which see dictators like Hosni Mubarak win landslide re-elections, but certainly Ontario can do better.
 

The ultimate goal of vote-based certification is not to expand workplace democracy or enhance workers rights. It is an attempt to make it harder for workers to form unions, period. Vote-based certification is a cumbersome barrier to unionization which is often cited as the reason for the much lower rate of unionization in the United States than Canada. If Mr. Hudak is intent on blocking hard-working Ontarians from receiving the fair wages, safe working conditions and decent pensions provided to them by their unions then that’s his prerogative, we just ask he be forthright with his intentions.

 
Josh Mandryk is a Research Associate for the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 793

Wisconsin-style anti-unionism has arrived in Ontario politics. As part of their changebook platform, the Ontario PCs have pledged to introduce so-called “paycheque protection” to restrict political expenditures by unions. While the PCs are fuzzy on the details, paycheque deception, as it is more accurately described, generally requires unions to obtain the explicit written consent of all of their members before using union dues for political activities. This requirement effectively prohibits political engagement due to the financial and logistical burden it creates. Moreover, this requirement is largely unjustifiable since union democracy allows members to vote on and provide input into their union’s political activities.

Paycheque deception is yet another example of Canadian conservatives increasingly adopting the more reactionary and extreme positions of the American far-right. In the United States, paycheque deception legislation and initiatives on state ballots have been championed by Grover Norquist, far-right libertarian and President of the lobby group Americans for Tax Reform. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because in recent weeks Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” for U.S. Senators and Representatives to vow to not raise taxes has received well-deserved credit for obstructing U.S. debt ceiling and deficit talks and bringing America to the brink of default. Norquist himself cannot be credited with the idea of paycheque deception, however, which he adopted from an Orange County pro-school voucher group called the Education Alliance. The Alliance was engaged in a long-running battle with teachers’ unions, who rightfully opposed public education funding being diverted to taxpayer subsidies for wealthy Californians to enroll their children in private schools. Out of this struggle paycheque deception was born as an attempt to silence the teachers’ unions’ defence of public education.

Paycheque deception applies burdensome requirements on unions which don’t similarly apply to corporations or other special interest groups. Business groups like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and countless multinational corporations lobby heavily and provide generous political contributions but face no parallel shareholder protection. Special interests could easily be excluded from the political process by adopting restrictions on third-party advertising, bans on corporate and union donations, and by increasing subsidies and lowering the overall contribution limit. That, however, is not the objective.

As much as unions are vilified by conservatives and the corporate media, we have all benefitted tremendously from their activism. This is because unions, unlike corporations and so many other special interests, rarely restrict their political efforts to measures which singularly benefit themselves as an institution. Rather, unions have been at the forefront of the push for the establishment of our health and social safety net. Unions fought for basic workplace standards like the eight hour workday, weekends, health and safety legislation and banning child labour. Their political activity brought about maternity leave, Employment Insurance and the Canada Pension Plan. Unions were champions of universal healthcare and helped counter the insurance industry’s campaign against Medicare at the time of its inception. Today, unions are at the forefront of the battle to protect vital health and social services from privatization and cutbacks. This activism benefits all Ontarians, not only those paying union dues.

The Ontario PCs are proposing these changes in the name of working Ontarians, but their disingenuous concerns for workers couldn’t be further from the truth. If they wanted to protect Ontario workers the last PC government wouldn’t have cut the Ministry of Labour’s budget by 46 percent and fired a third of Ontario’s workplace safety inspectors. If they cared about Ontario workers’ paycheques the last PC government wouldn’t have frozen minimum wage at $6.85 from 1995 to 2003. Paycheque deception hurts working families by excluding their voices from the debate. Paycheque deception is about furthering the dominance of the business class over our political discourse, to the inevitable detriment of the vibrancy of our democracy and the welfare of ordinary Ontarians.

Josh Mandryk is a Research Associate for the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 793