By renouncing the Rand Formula, did Tim Hudak forgo a winning formula for the next election?

A fascinating poll by Forum Research shows the remarkable vulnerability of unions in Ontario. And helps explain why the Tory leader spent two years targeting them.

The Rand Formula requires everyone in a unionized workplace to pay union dues, whether or not they join. Without the cash flow, unions couldn’t pay their way, which is why Hudak has long wanted to cut off their fiscal lifeline.

Turns out Hudak wasn’t alone. The latest Forum poll confirms what many have suspected and labour has long understood: Given the choice, workers won’t pay dues. It’s human nature to want something for nothing.

That’s why unions fought so hard in the 1940s to make people pay up. A prolonged strike at a Windsor car plant was finally settled by judge Ivan Rand, who reasoned that non-members shouldn’t be free riders. In the early 1980s, a Tory government made it Ontario law.

Fast forward six decades to the Internet era: Music downloads are free and media aggregators charge nothing for newspapers. Why pay for union representation when you can be a free rider?

Today, unsurprisingly, a strong majority of Ontarians would do away with the Rand Formula: 62 per cent disagree with compulsory union dues, compared to a mere 24 per cent who support Rand. Even among union members, 50 per cent oppose union check-offs, with only 39 per cent in favour.

(Ontarians are divided on a different Tory proposal for a U.S.-style “right-to-work” law banning compulsory union membership: 42 per favour right to work, while 40 per cent oppose it.)

With such fertile anti-union animus, did Hudak blunder by removing Rand and right to work from his toolbox?

“This right-to-work issue just doesn’t have the scope or the power to fix the issues,” Hudak told a business audience last month, despite personally endorsing it. “So if we’re elected, we’re not going to do it — we’re not going to change the so-called Rand Formula.”

When the Forum results came out a week later, Hudak insisted he had no second thoughts about his U-turn: “The answer is no,” he replied firmly.

One possible explanation: Even if Ontarians quietly tell pollsters they fantasize about being free-riders, probe a little deeper and you’ll find they don’t want to dismantle unions or pick fights with them.

Hudak often points to former British PM Margaret Thatcher as the inspiration for his right to work crusade. But Thatcherism seems a poor fit for a province that has never been as polarized or paralyzed as the U.K. of the 1970s, when coal workers and press unions had a chokehold on major industries.

Canadian unions are not as confrontational as their British cousins. Rand has probably stabilized labour relations here.

Perhaps that’s why the Forum poll also found people were relieved to hear Hudak had dropped his plan: 39 per cent of people supported his climbdown, versus 31 per cent who disapproved (31 per cent didn’t know).

As always, pollsters get different answers by framing the questions differently. When a 2013 Harris-Decima poll asked Ontarians about paying dues “if they benefit from the union’s work,” — a subtle reference to free riders — 60 per cent supported the Rand Formula. And in a cautionary note for Hudak, a majority of Ontarians said they would be “suspicious” of politicians who try to limit unions.

The results may seem ambiguous and contradictory, but they provide one vital clue for the Progressive Conservatives: Attitudes toward union dues can turn on a dime. It all depends on the messaging and the counterattacks on the campaign trail. There’s no telling how Rand and right to work would play out in an election.

All that said (and unsaid) on unions, Hudak will have much more to say — and may yet have the last laugh. While he has renounced Rand, the Tory leader is focusing on a less controversial but more effective way of eviscerating the labour movement: Contracting out.

Everyone in the private sector does it. Governments already do it. Now the Tories want a lot more of it.

Fully two-thirds of Ontarians agree that “non-unionized private-sector workers should have the right to compete against unionized civil servants for public-sector jobs,” Forum found.

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This time, the Tories are on firmer political ground. Hudak has seen the polls, retaken our pulse and reassessed the anti-union impulses of the province.

Regardless of Rand, organized labour will be targeted by the Tories in the next Ontario election. Just not in the way many were expecting.