The Manitoba Public Insurance strike shows the NDP's support for arbitration is ... arbitrary

As Manitoba's official opposition, Wab Kinew and the NDP fought to preserve the use of binding arbitration as a means of ending labour disputes after 60 days.

On their third day in power, the now-premier and his party effectively gave Manitoba Public Insurance marching orders to avoid binding arbitration as a means of settling a strike that had already dragged on for 53 days.

According to the new government and its supporters, there's nothing inconsistent about championing the right to resort to binding arbitration in principle and arguing against the actual use of this conflict-resolution mechanism in a real-life situation.

The MPI affair nonetheless illustrates the enduring ties between Manitoba's NDP and the unionized public employees who continue to serve as one of the party's core constituencies.

The affair in question came to ahead on Friday, when the NDP sacked all but one member of MPI's board of directors and appointed a mostly new board for the expressed purpose of negotiating an end to a strike that began on Aug. 28.

"The first step in resetting the relationship with MPI employees is appointing a new board that will rebuild the relationship with workers by negotiating a fair deal," Justice Minister Matt Wiebe told reporters on Friday, two days after he was sworn in to cabinet.

Under Manitoba labour law, either MPI or its striking workers can apply for binding arbitration as early as Oct. 27 to settle this dispute.

If that happens, workers would return to their jobs and an independent arbitrator would effectively choose a new contract for both sides, considering their final offers as well as similar collective bargaining deals reached by other employers and workers.

Historically, labour in love with arbitration

Historically, labour unions like binding arbitration because it can limit the length of even the most intractable labour disputes. A 60-day maximum strike duration can give workers the confidence they won't be walking picket lines indefinitely if they choose to go on strike.

This is why Kevin Rebeck, president of the Manitoba Labour Federation, denounced former PC premier Brian Pallister in 2020 for introducing the Labour Relations Amendment Act, which would have done away with binding arbitration.

"Pallister has made his mind up to draw out labour disputes and to tip the scales," Rebeck said three years ago.

Organized labour's opposition to the act, in concert with NDP opposition, led interim premier Kelvin Goertzen to shelve the legislation in 2021, as an act of good faith.

Rebeck, who now advises the NDP government as a member of its transition team, said the NDP's support of arbitration as an option is not incongruous with preferring not to use that option to settle the MPI labour dispute.

"Getting a deal at a bargaining table is the best situation and if both sides can talk and have room to figure out a path forward that they can all live with, that's going to give us the best possible results," he said Sunday in an interview.

"That isn't incongruous with a law that says when either side is stubbornly not moving from their position and no longer wants to talk at a bargaining table and no longer wants to build a solution, that we have a path that doesn't let a strike or lockdown go on forever."

Two independent labour scholars concur with Rebeck's position.

"There are lots of situations where a union might figure they would get a better deal at the bargaining table rather than going to arbitration," said David Camfield, an associate professor of labour studies at the University of Manitoba.

Arbitration, added his labour studies colleague, professor Julie Guard, is "a less desirable approach to settling strikes than actually being reasonable."

Both Guard and Camfield said they see no issue with appointing a new MPI board to kick-start negotiations one week prior to the potential start of arbitration.

Guard said replacing "an intransigent board" to avoid arbitration is consistent with supporting the existence of arbitration as a last-ditch option.

Camfield said the NDP appears to be trying to rectify a PC policy mistake.

"They may feel that this was a strike that was really fundamentally caused by the previous government tying the hands  of MPI management through a restrictive mandate, and so they may be trying to break that impasse," he said.

This is precisely what the NDP claims it is doing.

"We've directed the Board to resolve the strike quickly, fairly and responsibly," Labour and Immigration Minister Malaya Marcelino said Sunday in a statement.

"The PC government allowed the MPI strike to drag on for weeks, leaving working people to struggle in the face of high costs."

One political science professor, however, said the NDP might regret this early move, especially as one of the new MPI board appointees is a senior labour official and another is a party member.

"I would say that there is a bit of a conflict here," said the University of Winnipeg's Malcolm Bird, who studies public sector boards. 

"Remember, boards are supposed to act in the long-term interest and have a fiduciary duty to the organization. You don't sit on a board as a representative of a group. You're supposed to kind of take off whatever identity hat you have on and sit on the board and think about what's best for this board."

Bird said Manitoba is the only province in Canada in which Crown corporations are seen as partisan entities by NDP and PC governments alike.

"When new governments come in, they don't trust them and so they remove them. This doesn't happen anywhere else," he said. "This is not how we should be governing, is not how our boards or our Crowns should be operating."