NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C.—Judy Darcy straddles the new and old NDP.

She’s a long-time labour leader. For 12 years, she was national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. For another six, she was chief negotiator for British Columbia’s Health Employees’ Union

She’s a long-time activist who, after a detour through the minefield of the sectarian left, graduated to the more fruitful field of movement politics.

She’s a long-time feminist who, in her youth, infiltrated a nation-wide beauty contest as a subversive Miss York University.

But she’s also a candidate in B.C.’s May 14 election for the very practical one-step-at-a-time New Democrats of provincial party leader Adrian Dix.

Which means — well — that’s she’s very practical.

And if New Westminster voters follow their usual pattern of electing New Democrats, she’ll win.

I catch up with Darcy in her campaign office just outside Vancouver. And I ask her how a Dix-led NDP government would manage to satisfy its labour supporters in the public sector while at the same time holding the line on spending.

“What we have to develop is a climate of respect,” she says. “I don’t think the union movement is expecting miracles. But people are really hungry for a change in approach.

“It may sound like a platitude. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. But it makes a difference.”

Still, she warns, “There would be times when we (unions and government) disagree.”

This is roughly the same approach that Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne takes to public-sector labour relations. And in Ontario, so far at least, it has worked.

After a year of tumult in the schools, Wynne has managed to make peace with leaders of her province’s teachers’ unions — in large part by talking to them nicely.

By contrast, B.C. labour relations have been anything but calm. Teachers have been at loggerheads with the Liberal governments of both Christy Clark and her predecessor, Gordon Campbell.

So too health care workers. In 2004, Campbell slashed the wages of hospital employees, precipitating a short but bitter strike. When the then premier tried to strip hospital workers of their bargaining rights, the union took its case to the Supreme Court of Canada — and won.

Darcy was hired by the Hospital Employees’ Union after the abortive 2004 strike in order, she says, to get both sides talking again.

“Gordon Campbell was quite bowled over that the union wanted to meet with him,” she recalls. “He was quite charming.”

More to the point, she says, the workers were able to make some gains by talking to the government.

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“It’s the kind of thing I’ve been doing all my life,” says Darcy. “As CUPE president, I’d go in during a crisis and try to reopen doors, get negotiations going again and find a solution.

“Most people don’t know it. But that’s what labour leaders do.”

Darcy wasn’t quite as conciliatory in 1993 when Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP government imposed its so-called social-contract wage cuts on that province’s public sector workers.

As national CUPE head, she fought those cuts vigorously.

But that, she insists, was different. The Ontario NDP government didn’t treat its workers respectfully. It rejected out of hand the suggestions labour leaders made, presenting them instead with a fait accompli.

For Darcy, it’s been a long road to New Westminster. By the age of 19, she was an active feminist. In 1970, after being named Miss York University, she used the opportunity to disrupt and denounce the Miss Canadian University beauty pageant.

Within a few years, she was organizing Toronto library workers for CUPE. In 1981, she ran for election provincially in Ontario under the banner of the now defunct Workers Communist Party, a tiny Marxist-Leninist sect. Her political foes have used that against her ever since.

By 1985, she was in the NDP and a rising star in the labour movement. In 1988, she ran for the federal NDP in a no-hope Toronto-area riding, placing third.

And now?

“I want to be part of a team that does serious work and builds relationships,” says the very practical Judy Darcy.

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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