Article content continued

That was last week. This week, those workers, and their votes, have the NDP singing a different tune. That’s because of news reports that UNIFOR, the country’s largest private-sector union, took Mulcair to the woodshed over his comments. According to Fergo Berto, UNIFOR director for London, “We asked the NDP to not make this an issue, that it be kept under wraps. There are a lot of issues out there to be talking about.” He added that UNIFOR President Jerry Dias also spoke to Mulcair over the weekend, after the debate.

UNIFOR has since disavowed Berto’s words, claiming that all they really want is “transparency.” But even the milder form of criticism still reveals the difficulty in reconciling the views of “progressives” with those of unionized labour.

It’s no accident, then, that this week Ottawa-area NDP candidate Paul Dewar laid out a six-point plan to “fix” the unionized public service, saying that federal workers have been “neglected, undermined and abused by brutal cuts and restrictive legislation under both Liberal and Conservative administrations.” He added: “What we really need to see from whatever government comes in is to stop this whiplash of hiring and firing people. We need stability in the public service.”

Translation: no more cuts and fewer temporary workers. But wait a minute — isn’t the NDP also promising to balance the books while increasing spending in areas like daycare? And won’t that be impossible unless they, er, cut somewhere else?