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Who Will Become BC's Next Labour Leader?

Next week, two candidates vie to make provincial history in the race to replace Jim Sinclair.

Tom Sandborn 21 Nov 2014TheTyee.ca

Tom Sandborn has covered the labour and health policy beats for The Tyee over the last decade. Currently he posts a couple columns of analysis and comment a month on those topics. He welcomes feedback and column suggestions at [email protected].

When the over 1,800 delegates slated to attend this year's BC Federation of Labour convention at Vancouver's Convention Centre leave the building next week, they are likely to have made labour history.

The only two declared candidates to succeed long-serving president Jim Sinclair are both women, so barring an unlikely candidate emerging from the floor, the BC Fed, which represents over half a million union members in the province, will be led by a woman for the first time in its history.

And not a decade too soon, in the view of many women in the labour movement and other fans of gender equity. Canada's first female head of a provincial labour federation, Nadine Hunt, was elected in Saskatchewan in 1978, and the Canadian Labour Congress chose its first female president, Shirley Carr, in 1986.

There are two contenders for the presidency this year. One is Irene Lanzinger, a teacher and union leader with years of experience in elected office who has served as the federation's secretary treasurer -- and Sinclair's political ally -- since she left her position as president of the BC Teachers' Federation in 2010.

The other is Amber Hockin, a former flight attendant and longtime activist in the Canadian Union of Public Employees, whose last position before she took a leave to conduct her run for the presidency was Pacific regional director with the Canadian Labour Congress.

In another race, Aaron Ekman is running unopposed to take Lanzinger's old post as secretary treasurer. He and Hockin are running as a team and are promoting their candidacies on a joint website.

Ekman, now 36, got his start in student politics in the Interior, then taught for two years in Japan, where he was expelled for organizing a student union on his campus. He has worked as a roofer, sheet metal worker and organizer. He is currently based in Prince George, where he works for the BCGEU as its Northern Regional Coordinator.

The BC Fed's convention takes place Nov. 24 to 28.

Meet the candidates

"The BC Fed should be a voice for all workers in the province," Lanzinger told me on Oct. 17, the day she announced her candidacy.

Lanzinger said her campaign would focus on creating more good, well-paying union jobs, apprenticeship and training, which she said had been "degraded" by the BC Liberals, and better protection for workers' health and safety, which she called "our most fundamental right."

As of Nov. 14, Lanzinger had been endorsed by Unifor, Canada's largest private sector union, Local 40 Unite Here, the Compensation Employees Union, the BC Teachers' Federation, the Hospital Employees Union, the BC Region of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the Health Science Association, and by Mark Gordienko, president of ILWU Canada (longshore workers) and Frank Everitt, president of the United Steelworkers 1-424. (Everitt's endorsement of Lanzinger contrasts with a decision by USW's Region Three to endorse her opponent, Amber Hockin.)

In an Oct. 28 phone interview, Hockin said she felt very positive about her campaign so far, and promised to bring "a very different leadership style" to the Fed. She said she wants to be "hard on issues, easy on people."

She underlined, as did several of her supporters, her skills at building consensus and "bringing everyone to the table," as well as her role in her Canadian Labour Congress work in organizing a large and complex labour school each year.

As of Nov. 14, Hockin and running mate Ekman had been endorsed by the BC Professional Firefighters Association, United Food and Commercial Workers 1518, United Steelworkers District 3, BC Government and Service Employees Union (BCGEU), Canadian Office and Professional Employees (COPE 378), Canadian Union of Public Employees BC (CUPE BC), International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Northwest District 250, IBEW Local 258, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Provincial Council.

When asked to define what makes her different from Lanzinger, Hockin said: "I get things done." When asked a similar question, Lanzinger declined to even implicitly criticize her opponent, saying, "You'd have to ask Amber about that."

Subtle differences in campaigns

The Lanzinger and Hockin campaigns are being careful publicly to minimize any sense of hostile competition in this race, both emphasizing that they intend to continue the involvement in social issues, diversity and other matters beyond servicing existing contracts that has been a signature characteristic of the Fed's past decade and a half under Jim Sinclair.

Both camps expressed a commitment to defend public sector workers from losing more jobs to contracting out, privatization and service cuts. Both candidates support an increase in the provincial minimum wage and improved health and safety regulations.

But subtle differences of emphasis in how these commitments are made suggest that a Lanzinger presidency would, perhaps unsurprisingly, look a lot more like the Fed under Sinclair than a Hockin presidency. The tone of Hockin's campaign suggests that she would be more tightly focused on traditional trade union organizing efforts and less extensively involved in the broad range of social issues and alliances with civil society groups that is often referred to as "social unionism."

Aaron Ekman, it should be noted, would disagree with that assessment. "Social justice campaigns form a key component of the work of the BC Fed," he recently told the website Rankandfile.ca, "and the reason I say the old dividing lines between social vs. business unionists are dead is that social unionists won the debate decades ago."

Nevertheless, it is notable that some of the influential unions that have endorsed the Hockin/Ekman slate this fall were central to the attempt in 2012 to run the IBEW's Michelle Laurie as a critical alternative to Sinclair and his policies. At the time, Laurie stated on her union local's website that: "In 2010, while serving as a vice president of the BC Fed, I became concerned about the lack of clear strategy, direction and focus at the leadership level."

She argued that the Fed "needs renewal and change to become more than a voice of protest," and she was widely viewed as representing the views of conservative private sector unions such as those in the building trades that were skeptical of Sinclair's social unionism. 

Gloves could come off

As noted, the public debate within this campaign has been relatively muted, especially if you contrast it to Question Period in the nation's legislatures or the angry denunciations that flew about in the recent round of civic elections. But beneath that surface of civility, many voices within the labour movement will mutter darker comments about one or the other of the candidates, albeit not for attribution.

Perhaps at the convention itself the gloves will come off and the reciprocal critiques will be more fully and publicly articulated. If so, that would be a healthy phenomenon for labour, allowing a wide-ranging debate about the best way for the B.C. union movement to regain some of the ground lost to neoliberalism and hostile governments in the last decade.

In Lanzinger and Hockin, the Fed has two strong, competent, experienced candidates who both want to take on the daunting and sometimes thankless task of leading over 500,000 members from affiliated unions across the province. It can only help the movement for them to fully articulate the differences and overlaps between their two approaches.

While Question Period might be improved if MPs and MLAs learned from the mutual respect exhibited by the BC Fed candidates so far, the level of debate at the Fed convention could use a little of the rough, passionate tone that our elected politicians put on display in their legislative mosh pits.  [Tyee]

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