Redford Tories have good news and bad news for government union’s president

AUPE President Guy Smith with some of the approximately 1,000 demonstrators who gathered at the Alberta Legislature yesterday afternoon to protest against privatization talk by Premier Alison Redford. Below: Former AUPE President Dan MacLennan talking with former premier Ralph Klein; Human Services Minister Dave Hancock.

Veteran Conservative cabinet minister Dave Hancock had good news and bad news for Guy Smith, who was acclaimed yesterday to another two-year term as president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.

As the minister in charge of Premier Alison Redford’s unwieldy Ministry of Human Services, Mr. Hancock told the Calgary Herald Thursday the provincial government has no plans just now to privatize or download onto municipalities any of the province’s many social programs and services.

That’s good news for Mr. Smith, who had to be deeply concerned when Premier Redford started talking openly about her privatization ideas toward the end of the Conservative leadership campaign, because it means the government will likely put off at least until after the next general election what has to be a nightmare scenario for the president of the province’s largest public service union.

But it’s bad news for Mr. Smith because it means privatization of social services likely remains on the government’s wish list, if not on its agenda.

As Mr. Hancock told the Herald: “It’s too early to really set timelines. I mean, that’s certainly a goal. Obviously she set it up as a goal and I think we want to have over the next six months a very clear indication of what the possibilities of this department might be.”

That doesn’t sound like someone who’s completely ruling out the idea of a pretty extensive program of privatization – which, since we’re talking about the services that are essential to Alberta’s weakest and most vulnerable citizens that are more professionally and accountably delivered by public employees, sounds like a pretty bad idea.

Indeed, the very notion of the ridiculously massive Human Services Ministry – made up of such former ministries and programs as Children’s Services, Employment, Homelessness, Seniors and Community Supports – lends itself to conspiracy theories. It may have simply been set up as a public-relations gambit to reduce the number of cabinet ministers, but it sure sounds like a bunch of “assets” slated for the chopping block.

The potential for bad news is why AUPE could move more than 1,000 participants in its annual general meeting down the street to the steps of the Alberta Legislature yesterday afternoon to blow whistles and generally raise a hullabaloo about the prospect of more privatization.

It made for a great show, although it’s highly doubtful anyone inside the august old legislative building was paying attention – after all, as so often seems to be the case in that place, the lights were on, but no one was home.

However, since these are not normal times for Alberta, it behooves everyone on both sides of this privatization brouhaha to pay attention to what the other guys are saying.

From the perspective of public service unions like Mr. Smith’s, it means first that they need to be realistic about who Ms. Redford is.

It’s almost as if everyone was so enthusiastic about her pledge to defend public health care – or so frightened of then-frontrunner Gary Mar’s suggestion he’d be open to health care privatization – that they forgot to look at what she had to say about other potential targets for private sector mischief.

They shouldn’t have. Her privatization plans, after all, were all there on her campaign website in black and white (black and green, actually) from Day 1 of her campaign.

It also means that supporters of public services need to be prepared not just to blow whistles and yell through bullhorns – although that may yet turn out to be the most effective tactics in their arsenal – but also to try talking with the Redford Government.

After all, thanks to three strong presidents over the past decade and a half, AUPE has been a remarkable success story – growing to close to 80,000 members since the dark days of the mid-1990s when premier Ralph Klein went after public employees wearing a hockey mask and wielding a chainsaw – metaphorically speaking – reducing AUPE to well under 40,000 members.

A significant part of the secret to AUPE’s growth and success during this period was the willingness of presidents Dan MacLennan, Doug Knight and Guy Smith to talk to the government as well as to yell at it.

Unfortunately for Mr. Smith, some of the government people he spent time talking to are no longer in Ms. Redford’s cabinet, so he is going to have to work on that relationship, as well as keep his powder dry.

From the Redford Government’s perspective, its strategists need to remember that talk like the premier’s privatization musings is not normal chitchat to any of the public service unions whose members, acting on their own, arguably pushed her campaign over the top.

Despite high support in public opinion polls right now, in the next general election Ms. Redford likely to face the most energized and enthusiastic opposition since the Liberals under Laurence Decore in the early 1990s. So she’s going to need the support of those public servants’ votes again if she wants to succeed in the election that really counts. And she’s sure not going to need noisy and inconvenient public demonstrations in the run-up to a provincial election.

As has been said here before, public service union members are notoriously hard to tell what to do. Indeed, it’s a dirty little secret of Alberta politics that a majority of Alberta public employees happily vote Conservative most of the time. But they will act in their own interests if threatened, just as they did when they felt they were threatened by Mr. Mar.

And since the depredations of the Klein Era are still fresh in many memories – and Alberta is still suffering from the damage he did to health care, human services, environmental protection and the like – Ms. Redford’s recent talk sounds threatening indeed.

So it makes sense for Ms. Redford to work on the relationship too, and to do it sometime in the next six months.

A good place to start would be for her to make a clear commitment not to download or privatize essential government services to children, seniors and the poor, just as she promised to defend true public health care in her leadership campaign.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.