Ontario’s house of labour is a house divided. But you won’t glimpse any behind-the-scenes bitterness at this week’s convention of the Ontario Federation of Labour.

Thanks to Tim Hudak’s Tories, union leaders are sticking to their story — and sticking together. But for the OFL, a storied group of unions, there is an untold tale (big labour not being big news these days, despite their week-long meeting in Toronto):

The spectre of war with an anti-union Tory government-in-waiting has brought internal peace to unionists at war with themselves. Nothing like an external opponent to keep internal enemies in line.

Maverick OFL president Sid Ryan won re-election unchallenged Tuesday, dodging the bullet fired by dissident unionists plotting his ouster a few months ago. The OFL has been in turmoil since Ryan took power four years ago — its treasury bleeding money, its senior staff licking their wounds, its member unions nursing grievances.

Looking into the parlous state of its finances, a stark auditor’s report this year warned that the OFL might not be able to continue as a “going concern.” After decades in existence, the umbrella group represents more than 1 million workers from 54 unions, but two of the province’s biggest — the Ontario Nurses’ Association and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union — have pulled out and stopped paying dues in protest.

Against that backdrop, Bob Linton of the private sector UFCW union, backed by the United Steelworkers, tested the choppy waters of an OFL leadership campaign fight. But he found a fierce opponent in Ryan, an enduring figure in the labour movement who took the helm of the OFL by acclamation in 2009.

Ryan marshalled the backing of bigger unions that lacked the appetite for an untimely internal war. Linton’s candidacy was stillborn, and Ryan’s leadership reborn.

Now the OFL can present a united front as it tries to rally a demoralized union movement in anticipation of a final confrontation with the opposition Progressive Conservatives. In his convention speech, Ryan targeted the Tories for mounting an “unprecedented attack on workers’ rights and wages” that would bring U.S.-style “right-to-work” laws to Ontario:

“Tell your brothers and sisters the truth: Tim Hudak’s policies will reduce the power of workers in the workplace.”

As is his wont, Ryan shifted to the rhetoric of crusader-orator: “Brothers and sisters, it’s time for a People’s Agenda for Ontario,” he exhorted, citing the need for a “Common Front” with anti-poverty groups.

It is Ryan’s zeal for marginalized groups that marks him as a high-profile activist. To his critics, he is the embodiment of a movement that would rather be in the margins than the mainstream.

The OFL has been riven by such tensions ever since the wage freezes imposed by Bob Rae’s NDP government and fights with the Mike Harris Tories in the 1990s. After years of internecine carping, the bigger unions wanted to keep the focus on a future PC government. And so, in his time of trouble, Sid Ryan owes his personal salvation to Tim Hudak’s attacks on “union bosses.”

Now, many Progressive Conservatives are having second thoughts about the anti-union strategy. At their September policy convention, rank and file members openly questioned him about contentious proposals to let workers opt out of paying dues or joining unions. Less than half of Tory delegates wanted to make the right to work strategy a key campaign plank.

Nick Kouvalis, the right-wing political consultant who organized Rob Ford’s winning mayoral campaign, believes Hudak has opened a wedge against himself. Writing in QP Briefing (a Torstar daily newsletter), Kouvalis argued that union-bashing is “not a winner with the general population” or the Tory base.

The PC “union bosses narrative” will only alienate voters at a time of growing economic anxiety. And Hudak’s handiwork is reviving the moribund Working Families coalition — an ad hoc grouping of major labour unions that bankrolls anti-Tory ads at election time, Kouvalis warned.

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Now, the OFL convention stands as another example of the unintended consequences of Hudak’s attacks. An anti-union narrative has wrought newfound unity in a long divided labour movement — misfiring with the middle class and firing up the working class.