Remembering Brian Mulroney

Today marks two years since Brian Mulroney died.

Well, technically, he died on the 29th of February, but that comes around only once every 4 years.

Anyhow, to commemorate the life of Canada’s 18th prime minister, I wanted to highlight some of the effects he had on labour in Canada while in office—and even long after.

His 9-year stint in that office brought in policies and practices that affected unionization rates across the country. For example, in the 6 years after Mulroney signed his Free Trade deal with US-president Ronald Reagan, Canada lost nearly 335,000 manufacturing jobs. The sector that drove unionization during and following the Second World War lost 1 in 6 of its jobs between 1988 and 1994. In the nearly 40 years since the signing of the Free Trade Agreement, the manufacturing sector’s share of the national GDP has been cut in half, plummeting from 20% to just 10%.

Mulroney also privatized nearly two dozen Crown corporations and government-owned entities while in office, which, of course, employed unionized public sector workers prior to their sell offs.

HIs government, similar to the recent Trudeau government, used back-to-work legislation—including huge fines, wage cuts, and contract concessions—nine times against unionized workers between 1985 and 1992.

The unionization rate fell from 37.8% in 1984 to 33.7% in 1993, dropping 4 full percentage points while Mulroney was prime minister. However his attack on workers continued to affect workers beyond his time in the PMO. Unionization rates continued to fall for decades, bottoming out at 29.61% in 2018, after we had 4 more prime ministers, although the rate of decline softened with the turn of the century.

Concurrent to Mulroney’s efforts to undermine the working class were actions by provincial governments trying to make it more difficult for workers to unionize.

For example, in the 1970s, as union rates were still climbing, card checks were nearly universal across the country. Nova Scotia got rid of theirs in 1977.  The plus side of the card check system is all unions needed to do was find support from a majority (usually between 50% and 55%) of the workers at a workplace they wanted to organize, get them to sign union membership cards, then present those cards to their respective labour boards. If the boards found that the union had demonstrated support among a majority of workers, they would certify them as a bargaining unit, and employers were obligated to respect that bargaining unit.

However, the benefit of card check to workers across the country began to change in 1977 but really nosedived starting in 1984. As mentioned, Nova Scotia was the first province, in 1977, to get rid of card checks. 

In May 1984, the British Columbia government switched their card check system for a mandatory voting system. Unions could still collect card checks, but the BC labour board had to hold a certification vote, regardless of how many union cards were signed. Alberta embraced mandatory voting 4 years later, followed by Newfoundland in 1994, Ontario in 1996, and Manitoba in 1997.

Mandatory voting is detrimental to the broader labour movement. It leads to not only lower success rates among unionization efforts but also fewer certification attempts.

Naturally, as unionization rates fall, so do job protections. Workers, broadly, will make less, have fewer benefits, work in less safe environments, and have less leverage when trying to improve their own material conditions. As a result, unions over time have a tendency to focus on their own gains rather than gains for the labour movement as a whole. The days of solidarity among unions have been replaced mostly with locals focusing on their own workplaces. Gone are the days of thousands of workers protesting in the streets for their rights and for better pay and working conditions.

We still have not recovered from the damage inflicted by Mulroney on the working class.