Manufacturing Dissent

"For the first time in the 60-year history of the OPPA (Ontario Provincial Police Association [union]) Tim Hudak has given us no choice but to engage in a publicity campaign during an election. [Mr. Hudak] would launch a direct assault on the collective agreements of police associations right across the province. His positions on arbitration, public-sector pensions and further wage freezes, among other issues, are unacceptable to our members."
"Let me be clear. These ads do not serve as an endorsement for the Liberals or the NDP. This also does not mean that we don't respect and work well with many in the Conservative caucus. We just don't want this Conservative as premier."
Jim Christie, OPPA president

What optics, what a sense of entitlement, that a public sector union representing provincial police would exert pressure within the voting public to bypass the vote for a politician who promises to bring public sector unions into line with reasonable wage scales and benefits more reflective of the earnings and benefits accruing to the average taxpayer. Using taxpayer funds to unethically interfere in the election process.

The Ontario Liberals have ruled the province for the last eleven years. During that time, the elected premier, Dalton McGuinty, curried favour with public service unions, since to oppose them means bringing down the righteous wrath of the hundreds of thousands of public sector workers on their heads. During election time, opposing unions becomes a formula for failure. As does angering voters in critical ridings whose rage can be turned around by cancelling unwanted projects.

Canada's manufacturing and tax-revenue source for many years was smoke-stack Ontario. Under the Liberals such manufacturing jobs have gone the way of the Dodo. Tim Hudak, the leader of the province's Progressive Conservative party has pledged to tackle the province's spending and to eliminate the $12-billion annual deficit, the largest of any province in the country. This is a pledge that cannot be achieved without at the same time paying attention to the greatest gobbler of revenue; public service.

Photo by Blair Gable -- Macleans

 

The OPP union has entered the electioneering fray to devote a considerable amount of funds in agitating against the Conservatives, to the favour of the Liberals who never saw a union demand they couldn't live with on behalf of the taxpayers. A raw recruit begins his professional life as a member of the OPP with a $50K annual salary, that swells swiftly upwards to over $90K in the space of several years. Many among the 6,000-strong force earn at and above $100K.

They are, in other words, very well compensated for the vital and sometimes dangerous work they perform to "serve and protect". Oddly enough even though the Liberal government has grown long in the entitlement-tooth over the past decade, demonstrating time and again its poor management through stupendous loss of tax dollars, wasting $1-billion on ehealth, as much on cancellation of two gas plants for election purposes, and more on Ornge corruption, some voters still will poll Liberal.

Tim Hudak is looking at ways in which he can bring the province out of its excess spending habit, cutting back on waste and hoping to bring the province to eradication of its deficit to tackle the debt. But even though the OPP is actively engaged in an investigation of criminality surrounding Ornge and the gas plant cancellations, they prefer to dance with the party that brung them to the dance of salary enhancement.

Good luck to Tim Hudak. Let's just hope he doesn't linger too long on contemplating Jean Charest's attempts as then-newly-minted premier of Quebec in a Liberal government that attempted to take on the union monopolies and entitlements and speedily back-pedalled from the crisis-avalanche created through a union-organized backlash it simply was unwilling to contend with.