Sean Speer: The Conservatives are wrong to side with the Air Canada flight attendants 

Notwithstanding its potential upside, the biggest risk of the realignment is that Conservative politicians cut corners on their principles. They’re so determined to bring these new and different voters into their electoral coalition that they choose the easy path of ideological compromises and political deals with labour unions. Doug Ford’s Ontario Progressive Conservative Party is a good (or bad) example. It has entered into transactional arrangements with union leadership, including with regard to local procurement rules, in exchange for their election endorsements even though the policy details are often in tension with conservative principles and based on the false assumption that union leaders are a proxy for the working class. The latter involves misreading what is actually driving the realignment. It isn’t that unions themselves are drifting to the Right. In many cases, working-class frustration is actually directed at unions and their left-wing leadership. Workers who feel abandoned by the Left aren’t necessarily eager to see Conservatives doing deals with their bosses. As for the former, if the realignment is to be additive, it can’t come at the expense of conservatism itself. There’s no point in winning if it involves a series of ideological compromises that shift the party (or parties) decisively to the Left. It would amount to winning short-term battles but ultimately conceding the broader competition of ideas. The alternative is harder but ultimately more promising. It’s what Stephen Harper has called “applied conservatism,” which amounts to an exercise in applying fixed principles to a new and dynamic set of issues. That means thinking seriously about what conservative ideas have to say about the rise of gig work, about the economic dislocation brought on by trade and technology, about the stresses of family and community life in an age of uncertainty. This isn’t the easy route. It’s the long path. But it’s the only way to build the kind of durable relationships with working-class Canadians for the realignment to have a lasting effect on our politics. Yet the political incentives tilt decidedly in favour of the short path. The Air Canada strike is a case in point. Faced with a highly visible labour dispute, Conservative MPs have overwhelmingly lined up with the flight attendants. It may feel instinctively right in the moment. But it’s the wrong lesson to draw from the realignment. Not only has Air Canada offered a nearly 40 percent increase in total compensation over four years—a figure that exceeds wage settlements in other parts of the economy—but the unions’ demands are detached from the company’s underlying financial position. This is a company that required pension dispensation not that long ago, and for which credit agencies and markets remain broadly concerned about its debt loads. The unions’ adversarial poise—similar to what we’ve seen out of the Canada Post union—is a sign that the realignment’s promise of greater cooperation between firms and labour certainly doesn’t apply in some cases. For both Air Canada and Canada Post, the unions have adopted maximalist positions that seem more about small “p” politics than the evidence of their members’ relative wages and benefits compared to other workers in the economy. This matters for the realignment project because notwithstanding immediate polling, it’s not obvious that they’re going to find sympathy from other working-class Canadians over the long run. Most working-class members aren’t unionized or receiving 10 percent annual benefit increases. They’re instead among the 130,000 passengers per day whose summer vacations or flights to weddings, funerals or trips home have been disrupted by the union’s obstinacy. These are the real realignment voters, and the risk is that Conservatives are missing them by siding too readily with the flight attendants. It’s encouraging that Conservatives are seized with the politics of realignment. It represents the best chance in a generation to build a governing coalition rooted in the everyday lives of working Canadians. Harper’s old observation still holds: conservatism becomes its most powerful when it’s made relevant to ordinary people. The party’s instinct to view labour disputes like the Air Canada strike through the lens of the realignment is therefore understandable, even if it’s ultimately misguided. The test therefore will be how they pursue it. The temptation will always be to take the short road of reflexive sympathies or transactional deals. The harder but more promising path is to apply conservative principles to new and unsettled questions in a way that speaks to working-class Canadians who feel overlooked or underrepresented in our politics. That requires the prudence to distinguish between flight attendants pressing maximalist demands and the working families stranded at the airport because of them.