FLETCHER: BC Conservatives must untangle the NDP-union alliance

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.VICTORIA – The BC NDP ran an almost entirely negative election campaign for the October 24 snap election.David Eby and candidates turned to a handful of BC Conservatives’ old social media and other public comments in an effort to create a false picture of racist, anti-gay reactionaries, keen to slash public services. And some of the nastiest messages were delivered not by the NDP but by two of the province’s biggest unions.The BC Teachers Federation generally sees itself as above all political parties, denouncing the NDP and its rivals in turn for their alleged failure to hire enough teachers and pay them enough. But during this election, the union detoured around its rule against supporting political parties and ran ads denouncing the BC Conservatives.Another big advertiser was the Hospital Employees’ Union (HEU), warning of Alberta-style healthcare privatization if the BC Conservatives succeeded. HEU president Barb Nederpel delivered the familiar rhetoric about “two-tiered healthcare” via the ads and in her own social media videos.“BC Conservative health critic Anna Kindy has made it clear that she supports two-tiered health care,” Nederpel said in a Facebook video. “That’s the Alberta approach, and it raises a serious question. Is that what the BC Conservatives want for us?”A couple of things Nederpel didn’t mention, besides the fact that there are three countries in the world where private health insurance is banned: Cuba, North Korea, and Canada. Kindy, likely to be the next health minister, is a family doctor by trade. Nederpel, officially a medical records clerk in Kamloops, is not only the union president and a member of the labour council that works to influence local elections, but is also a long-time member of the BC NDP provincial executive.As third-party advertisers, these big unions have increased influence since the BC NDP banned direct corporate and union donations to political parties during John Horgan’s term..How big are these unions? According to a dissident HEU member who has researched the organization extensively, there are more than 300 staff working for the union. A mailroom assistant in the union office makes $71,000 a year, plus pension and benefits including a clothing allowance. The entry-level rate for a hospital cleaner, cook, or orderly is $27.40 an hour, minus union dues, of course.One of Eby’s last big election promises was to the BC Nurses’ Union. He vowed that if re-elected, he would pass a law defining a required maximum number of patients for each nurse on duty. This is similar to the perennial battle with the teachers’ union over setting maximum class sizes.Eby would know as well as anyone how this would work in practice. His government has struggled with hundreds of unfilled nurse positions as the overloaded healthcare system saw emergency wards backed up with people who can’t find a family doctor.Some patients leave after many hours without treatment. Some die waiting in the ER. Doctors and nurses are leaving our Cuban-style monopoly healthcare system because it is failing.One of Eby’s campaign messages was a promise to increase a program to recruit US doctors and nurses. He spent hundreds of thousands to give away coffee outside hospitals in Seattle, not far from the Washington cancer clinic where the BC government paid the full private rate for chemotherapy because BC hospitals couldn’t handle their cancer patient load.Giving a union control over its own staffing levels means it effectively takes control of the provincial budget. We saw that in schools where rural areas can’t make the rigid student-staff ratio work. We would see it in hospitals as well.Another huge union tangle facing premier-elect Lorne Doerkson is the NDP’s restriction on public construction, imposed during Horgan’s term. It was a reaction to the Christy Clark government’s imposition of an open-shop work site for the Site C power dam, a first for that kind of heavy construction project.The NDP government mandated 19 building trade unions as required for large public construction such as highways, bridges, and hospitals. These are mostly US-based international unions like the Steelworkers and Teamsters, which workers are required to join within 30 days.The Orwellian name for these construction contracts is “community benefits agreements,” because nothing says community like a union based in Chicago or New Jersey. I’ll have more on this monumental challenge in a future column.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: BC Conservatives must untangle the NDP-union alliance

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