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Tag: Jagmeet Singh
Labour minister Steve MacKinnon has only been on the job for a few weeks after Seamus O’Regan opted to resign after deciding not to run again in the next election, and already he’s facing his first major test in the potential lockout of employees by both of the major railway companies in this country—Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Kansas City. Both have been in deadlocked negotiations with the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference union for weeks, with the union demanding better wages and benefits as well as better crew scheduling, claiming that the railways want to do away with fatigue management rules. Business lobby groups are already howling about the economic damage that a work stoppage would do across the country, but is MacKinnon going to be able to resolve the situation, or will it degenerate into one where some form of back-to-work legislation is required?
So far, MacKinnon has been pretty adamant that he wants the groups to come to an agreement at the bargaining table, but so far that hasn’t yielded much in the way of results. The railways have both asked for binding arbitration, but so far MacKinnon has resisted that as well, again reiterating the same message about negotiation. So far, this government has been pretty good about respecting that particular ethos (mostly). There have been short strikes in key sectors that have lasted a few days, but in most cases, they have managed to come to an agreement after the labour disruption, which is the whole point—withdrawing labour puts pressure on the companies to be more amenable to compromise, lest the disruption to further economic damage to them. So far, the Liberals’ track record has been pretty consistent on that front, and most of those disruptions have been short-lived.
The exception to this was with the Port of Montreal in April 2021, when the government did pass back-to-work legislation, but as with most things in life, there is a great deal of nuance and context that goes along with what happened. In that particular case, negotiations had been deadlocked for three years, in particular over an issue of job security and extending shifts when the strike happened. But there was also a bigger picture to consider—this was during the height of the pandemic when global supply chains had been massively disrupted, and a further disruption with domestic port operations as exacerbating the problem, affecting not only Canada but our export markets. While the government has normally been willing to accept some level of economic damage in order to drive the best and lasting agreements, this was already at a time when the global economy was in chaos. The other thing to remember is that unlike previous back-to-work bills that happened under the Conservative government, this one did not dictate the conditions of the agreement, generally favouring the employer. The Montreal Port legislation instead mandated mediation and the appointment of a mediator-arbitrator to resolve the issues in the collective agreement, so that it wasn’t the government imposing terms on either the employer or the union.
This week, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has warned the government that he won’t support any kind of back-to-work legislation that favoured the employer, but doesn’t seem to have read the room where the Liberals are concerned and the fact that they have been the most pro-labour government in decades. Instead, his talking points seem to have been recycled from a decade ago, that they haven’t consistently threatened use of legislation, and that they have been more than willing on most occasions to let there be some economic consequence to ensure that the agreements happen through negotiation. Then again, Singh is also trying to recapture the blue-collar union vote that his party has been in the process of losing for a while now, as the Conservatives try to step in and appeal to those voters, particularly by trying to appeal to the imagined blue-collar values that eschew the kinds of progressivity that the urban academic class has largely captured the NDP with. (The Conservatives may not be successful, however, as those same unions will recall the union-busting legislation the Conservatives pushed through in the Harper era, no matter how much they try to draw a distinction between private sector and public sector unions).
This leaves MacKinnon with some tough decisions in the coming days, as he goes to meet with the representatives of our rail duopoly and the union. He has so far stuck to his guns when it comes to refusing to engage in a way that would appear to favour one side or the other, as binding arbitration might do, but we are also at a time when the economy is in a particularly fragile state as it comes for a “soft landing” from the inflationary spike that the pandemic supply chain disruptions precipitated, whereby we seem to have avoided going into a recession in order to tame that inflation. Rail disruptions do have a huge impact on our economy, because so much of our internal and external trade is dependent on those rail corridors. This federal government did allow for disruptions to happen in early 2020 with Indigenous protests, in spite of the demands for the police to move in and arrest them so that the trains would start moving again, but again, the government has been willing to tolerate a certain level of this disruption for the causes it believes in.
But if the parties in this dispute refuse to reach an agreement after days of a strike, the pressure from the business lobbies that still hold a great deal of sway with federal governments of every stripe will continue to build, and the Liberals are already in a polling deficit. Parliament is still a month away from its scheduled return from the summer break, so any proposed legislation to break the deadlock between the parties would force a recall, leading to even more unhappiness among parliamentarians of all stripes. We’ll see in MacKinnon can navigate this situation with a diplomacy and a sufficiently firm hand, or if this will result in the federal government needing to swallow its idealism and recall Parliament to pass back-to-work legislation.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This week, David Moscrop took a look at the state of the NDP for The Walrus and wondered if perhaps Jagmeet Singh’s time is up, and that after the next election the party should start looking for a new leader because of how marginalized the party has become under his stewardship. It’s a good piece and well worth reading, but there are a few holes in the narrative that I think need a bit more exploration to show how the party got to the state it’s in today, after their all-time high of winning 103 seats and forming the Official Opposition in 2011. There are a lot of things that happened during those years that are instructive as to why the party remains stuck at a rump fourth-place result, with more than a quarter of its sitting MPs opting to either not run again or resign early.
One of the things the piece doesn’t really go into is the failure by the party to consolidate any of its gains in 2011. In fact, a certain arrogance settled into the NDP almost immediately, as they kicked long-time Liberals out of their offices in Centre Block, and generally behaved in a manner that lacked any of the kind of graciousness that generally follows an election when MPs shuffle around offices. Question Period temporarily became a back-patting exercise where the Conservative government and NDP opposition congratulated one another for essentially creating a two-party system with “real differences” that could be debated, rather than the mushy-middle Liberals, who were thought to be facing extinction, and where the Elder Pundits declared that they must merge with the NDP if there was to ever be a chance of defeating Stephen Harper and the Conservatives ever again. Of course, that wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now (as some people are already starting the “merger” calls yet again).
What happened in 2011 was something of a fluke, because Quebec as a whole decided to vote emotionally for “Le Bon Jack,” as Jack Layton was touring with his cane, and insisting that he had beaten cancer (when it turns out he hadn’t, and questions remain as to just what he knew about his condition at the time, which his family studiously avoided ever explaining after he died). Prior to that, most of the riding associations in the province existed on paper only, and they had absolutely no grassroots depth. A lot of candidates were only ever paper candidates who signed up to put their name on a ballot for the sheer sake of the party running candidates in every riding so that they could maximize their advertising spend under Elections Canada rules. They never stood for nomination (in spite of the party insisting that they always run open nominations in every riding), and a number of them had never even visited their riding until after they’d won. And yet, they did not feel the need to actually do the work on the ground once they had been elected. Riding associations remained largely on paper, and no real attempt was made to actually build grassroots organizations (though they did feel they needed to stand up a provincial wing of the party, which never really did get off the ground). If anything, the party’s central leadership was being even more rigidly command-and-control as they cooked up the “satellite office” scheme, where MPs had to turn over a portion of their office budgets for these “satellite offices” in the province, which turned out to be contrary to the rules, and why MP Lise St-Denis crossed over to the Liberals when she didn’t want to have any part of it (or the bullying that surrounded the demands).
The other lesson from Thomas Mulcair’s leadership was not just that he tried to move the party further to the centre by dropping references to “socialism” in the party’s constitution, or that he was essentially pledging the same sort of austerity that Stephen Harper was offering, but rather that there was a reluctance to do the actual work. It soon became apparent in the House of Commons that as an opposition party, the NDP were pretty weak and had to rely heavily on staff from the leader’s office to do a lot of the work for them, and as a result, they never developed much in the way of bench strength while they had the opportunity. It was no surprise that their seat count dropped from 103 to 59, with nearly all of their Quebec seats falling away to the Liberals and a resurgent Bloc that had managed to sort out its own leadership woes, and Mulcair tried to coast on his three good days in Question Period during the ClusterDuff that didn’t translate to an ability to perform in the leadership debates.
The lack of desire to do the work has been a hallmark of Singh’s entire leadership, starting from the fact that he couldn’t be bothered to even seek a seat for at least the first year of his leadership before it became clear to him that he had become a non-entity in the media and needed to be visible in the House of Commons. But even before that, there seemed to be this expectation on the part of the party that because he was younger and more progressive than Justin Trudeau, that somehow the progressive voters among the Liberals would just switch over to him because he was so attractive and charming, as though that was all it was going to take.
Meanwhile, since the start of COVID, the party has mostly just been patting themselves on the back for pushing on an open door, whether it was extending pandemic benefits that the Liberals were never going to cut short, or the Supply-and-Confidence Agreement that allows the NDP to try and take credit for things they have done absolutely none of the work to achieve, while Singh tries to play both sides and still talk smack about Trudeau while he votes to prop him up on every occasion. Along the way, they’ve allowed the Conservatives to swoop in and take on their blue-collar base while Singh and the party cater to increasingly niche urban progressive narratives that have a tendency to be alienating to those blue-collar workers who used to vote for the party in a number of regions.
It’s not just the lack of a strategic vision that Moscrop points to, or their failing attempts to recapture the narrative of class politics. It’s the actual grassroots work on the ground that the party can’t get their heads around, which manifests itself in how their ground game has collapsed in successive elections as the Liberals outpaced them. Singh is a problem for the party, but he is only part of the problem, and they need to have a look in the mirror and see the deeper cultural malaise in the organization if they want to have any hope of making future gains.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has been on his usual summer tour, trying to show the flag, insist that he’s still relevant, and on this particular summer, hoping to raise awareness for his candidates in the two upcoming by-elections in Elmwood—Transcona in Manitoba, and LaSalle—Émard—Verdun in Quebec. The former is traditionally an NDP stronghold so there is less cause for concern there, but the NDP are running a known local city councillor in Verdun, which has been a traditionally strong Liberal riding, but after what happened with Toronto—St. Paul’s, the Liberals should not be taking anything for granted, which is possibly why they decided to appoint a hand-picked candidate for the riding rather than go through a nomination race, though that same calculation could bite them in the ass as they alienated some of the local Liberals who had been organizing for such a competition, and who wanted a say in who was going to be on the ballot. Regardless of the by-elections, Singh has a lot to prove this summer, but we’ll see how much of it is able to penetrate.
Part of the summer tour has been a process of making announcements of things that he is trying to push the government to do, but they have not exactly been very well thought-out or even feasible. For one, Singh is demanding price caps on certain grocery items while he rails about grocery CEOs, completely ignoring that the prices for groceries have been impacted largely by global factors—the largest has been climate changes, as droughts impact food-producing regions, in Canada and abroad, with a few floods or hurricanes thrown in for good measure, and the lasting impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that has hurt global wheat and cooking oil markets. The profit margins of grocery chains have remained stable throughout the recent bout in inflation, and while said grocery chains are not blameless for prices, they are not the cause. In addition, talking about price caps as inflation is back down to the control range is nonsense economics, not that wage and price controls ever really made sense, nor did they last work in the 1970s when they were introduced. But hey, I guess “Zap, you’re frozen!” was due to make a comeback at some point.
Singh is also trying to insert himself into the housing debate, fully ignoring that this is almost entirely provincial jurisdiction. This week he was talking about federal measures to curb “renovictions,” where landlords will evict long-term tenants under the rubric of needing to do renovations so that they can then increase rental prices. Singh put the blame for this entirely on “corporate landlords,” which is a reach, and then promised “federal incentives” to “force municipal legislation” to ban the practice, even though it’s actually the provincial governments who control landlord-tenant legislation. The very notion that federal “incentives” can force municipalities to do anything is pretty risible, considering that even the Housing Accelerator money the federal government is currently offering can’t even stop certain cities from hiking their development charges because they think they’ll bring in more money from them than they would get from the feds. The fact that Hamilton brought in renoviction measures locally is hardly indicative that this would or could even work in other cities, and this has a whiff of Singh trying to pump the tires of its mayor, Andrea Horwath, because she was his leader when he was an Ontario MPP, never mind that she was possibly the most useless party leader in recent memory. (I should mention that the Liberals also promised federal action to stop “renovictions” in their last platform, but never spelled out what those measures were, and they seem to have disappeared from their agenda).
Singh’s line that both the Liberals and Conservatives made housing unaffordable not only ignores the broader societal factors—that housing is treated as an investment vehicle for retirement, creating the incentives to constrain supply in order to drive up property values—but it also conveniently turns a blind eye to all of the provinces who had NDP governments that also did little to improve affordability, even at a time when it was not as outrageously bad as it is currently, particularly given that housing is largely a provincial responsibility. Oh, but that doesn’t fit his simplistic narratives, where everything is the fault of corporate villains, and the NDP’s class warriors will set everything right solely through the application of political willpower—just as soon as they get access to that Green Lantern Ring hidden in the PMO.
If anything, this looks a lot like desperate promises made by a floundering leader who is in trouble, not coincidentally because more than a quarter of his caucus has announced that they are either not running again in the next election, or have already left. His attempts to sound tough about the Liberals and their record fall flat because his party are in an agreement to prop them up until the next scheduled federal election, and while he is getting parts of his agenda accomplished as a result of said agreement, his attempts to take ownership of them are also falling flat because he and his caucus have done literally none of the work, and have largely been patting themselves on the back for pushing on an open door, and a lot of voters can see that.
The polling has also borne out an unusual phenomenon that the NDP vote hasn’t risen while the Liberals have taken a beating, and it’s hard not to put much of the blame for that on Singh, whether it has been his inability to connect with an audience, his alienation of the working-class voter that used to be competitive in a number of ridings, or his refusal to understand what his own job is. Most of the time, Singh appears to be gunning for Doug Ford’s job rather than Justin Trudeau’s, and perhaps it’s time that he just owns up to it and return to the arena of provincial politics where he started, lest he alienate even more of his own caucus, lose even more voters, and continue to take up space in federal politics, fighting on provincial issues.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
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The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
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