Conservatives Continue Attack on Unions
Oct 06, 2011
The federal Conservative government has recently launched another attack on labour organizations, this time via a private member’s bill designed to force Canada’s unions to open their books to the public.
Conservative MP Russ Hiebert has recently tabled a bill that seeks to change the rules governing labour organizations under the Income Tax Act. Under the Act, unions (like charities and municipalities) are exempt from paying taxes. If adopted, it’s likely the bill would force unions to apply financial disclosure rules that are already in place for charities.
This proposed bill is part of the continued efforts of the Harper government to take on Canada’s unions. It wasn’t very long ago that the government sided against unions at Canada Post and Air Canada during recent labour disputes. By attacking unions, it’s pretty obvious that the government is trying to neutralize what will be one of their major opponents in a coming round of government cutbacks.
Private members’ bills are normally a means for parliamentarians to table issues of personal or local interest before the House. However, it now appears that they are being used by the government as a means of addressing hot-button issues that will help to motivate their political base, but in a rather clever way that allows Harper himself to maintain some personal distance and appear “statesmanlike.”
The issue itself is, not surprisingly, an invented non-problem. Unions disclose their audited financial statements regularly to their elected boards, to union locals, and to delegates at their conventions. Annual audited financial statements must be filed with government labour boards, both provincially and federally. And individual members can request these statements from their union at any time.
Hiebert’s justification for using the Income Tax Act as his means of attacking unions is that, as he claimed in a media scrum, unions get “hundreds of millions of dollars of benefits” from the federal government, and thus owe taxpayers this level of transparency. As Jim Stanford has recently argued, this is complete nonsense. Unions receive almost no government subsidy or assistance whatsoever. Unions don’t pay income tax for the simple reason that they aren’t profit-making entities. There is no credible way that Hiebert can claim that unions are significantly subsidized by Canadian governments or taxpayers.
Of course, the moment Hiebert announced his bill a chorus of approval erupted from the usual suspects, including the Fraser Institute and other conservative and anti-union think tanks. Stanford suspects that these lobbyists, working quietly with Conservatives, are planning an assault on the right to collective bargaining in Canada much like we’ve seen in some states in the US recently.
The Harper government has made its contempt for the right to strike abundantly clear (as we know, the United Nations and the International Labour Organization have recognized the right to strike as a fundamental human right). It’s likely that the theatrics around this bill are just the first step in a broader attack on the right to unionize.
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