When Kathleen Wynne winged her way to Sault Ste. Marie for a weekend trip, she was weighed down by excess baggage.

Waiting for her in the ballroom of the Delta Hotel were more than 300 heavyweight delegates from one of the most influential union movements in the province: The Building and Construction Trades Council.

Assembled for their annual convention late last month, the delegates were in a fighting mood: Wynne had just poked them in the eye by siding with EllisDon, one of Ontario’s biggest construction companies, in a bitter dispute over the hiring of unionized workers.

Wynne was in town on a peace mission. But even for a premier who’s a pleaser — reflexively forging alliances and finding common ground — the union delegates were going to be a tough crowd.

As a courtesy, convention organizers were willing to shelter Wynne from a potentially hostile reception by offering her lunch in a private room off to the side. Waving off the protective cocoon, Wynne walked into a buffet reception where she chowed down with delegates.

And then she strode to the podium to kiss and make up with her longtime allies: The premier reconfirmed that she was changing her position (for the third time) — by backing (belatedly) the construction unions in their opposition to EllisDon’s demand for a special law allowing them to hire non-union workers.

“She recognized that there were some frayed tempers, and she did her best to patch some of that up,” said one person in the room.

Her zigs and zags (tracked in a recent column) are too complex to recap here. Suffice to say that when Wynne announced her final position, the unionists gave her a standing ovation.

The public reconciliation had been preceded by a refresher course from Pat Dillon, business manager of the trades council. He walked the premier through the past years of loyal support from his membership — not just in donations, but boots on the ground at election time.

Three of Wynne’s cabinet ministers also made nice with the membership, distinguishing their Liberal minority government from the anti-union rhetoric of the opposition Progressive Conservatives. Harder to explain was why the Liberals had made common cause with the PCs to support Bill 74, a private member’s bill put forward by a Tory MPP to get EllisDon out of its contractual obligations to unions.

One reason for the resentment was that Wynne’s office had failed to fully consult the building trades on the fallout from the legislation. Happily for the premier, a ruling by the Ontario Divisional Court in late September took the heat off the Liberals by granting EllisDon’s challenge of an earlier Ontario Labour Relations Board decision.

The court ruling spared the Liberals from having to intervene on the side of EllisDon, a major campaign donor. EllisDon had hired StrategyCorp to lobby MPPs on both sides of the aisle:

StrategyCorp’s choreography called for the Tories to bear the burden of introducing the legislation, while the Liberals would come on side after the fact. But when the votes were finally counted last week in the legislature, the Liberals bailed out and the Ellis-Don bill went down to defeat.

As promised, the premier had switched over to the building trades — along with her fellow Liberals, most of whom were worried about being on the wrong side of the issue (The NDP also voted against the bill, which it had opposed from the start; Liberal backbencher Steven Del Duca sided with the Tories).

It was a bad day for StrategyCorp and EllisDon, charter members of what I’ve dubbed the province’s lobbyist-industrialist complex. And, it seems, a good day for the union lobby.

After all, Dillon doesn’t just run the building trades. He also heads Working Families — a coalition of major unions that bankrolls massive anti-Tory advertising campaigns during every provincial election.

When he speaks, Liberals listen. When he complains, they are compliant.

“She was offside with a half-dozen unions,” Dillon told me as he reflected on this latest saga of political war and peace. All that “horsetrading behind the scenes” to placate corporate Ontario “doesn’t make for better relations” with the unions.

Wynne found herself caught in a wedge with her union allies, and a breach with a loyal corporate donor. But Dillon believes his message has penetrated into the premier’s office:

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Unions cannot be taken for granted. By showing contrition in Sault Ste. Marie, Wynne was absolved of her sins.

“In politics — I think in life — forgiveness is a great thing,” Dillon chuckles.

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