Explaining Varieties of Labour Market Deregulation: Post-Democracy and Policy in British Columbia and Newfoundland-Labrador, Canada (2000-2010)

This paper discusses labour market deregulation in two Canadian provinces – British Columbia and Newfoundland-Labrador. The argument is made that recent comparative literatures have yet to adequately consider the role of organized business interests, changes to political parties, and the growth of new political coalitions and programmatic alliances of ‘winners’ and their influence on labour market reform. Drawing on Colin Crouch’s theory of ‘Post-Democracy’, it is claimed that because of political differences within each province, policy makers and employers used different strategic responses to develop distinct solutions for their labour cost problems, as well as address the political realities of their electoral and governing circumstances from 2000-2010.

In British Columbia, over the course of the early 2000s, collective bargaining and union certification procedures were subject to major reforms and ‘conversion’, as organized labour was marginalized, and union density declined to 30 percent (15 percent in the private sector). Moreover, collective bargaining in the private sector was fragmented, public sector bargaining legislation was rewritten, and employment standard legislation substantially weakened while enforcement was subject to substantive cutbacks to resources. By contrast, in Newfoundland-Labrador, the major policy trajectory was one of ‘stasis’, with the renewal of coordinated bargaining in the construction sector as well as across the public sector that supported the highest union density rate in the country, at more than 39 percent. At the same time, public officials developed a number of new employment related social policies that led to the most substantial declines in poverty rates across Canada. The result of such policy choices was that instead of convergence in employment relations and market income inequality, there was still significant divergence and varieties of liberalization and deregulation across the provinces within Canada.

It is argued these differences in labour policy strategies and policy outcomes was due to the changing composition and activities of business, as well as the interaction between parties and citizens.  Using government documents, policy papers, official statistics, and interviews, the paper explores the different powers and capacities of business and organized labour and how these influenced governments, political parties, and policy in the two provinces.  The paper also pays especially close attention to changing role of political parties, and to the impact of income inequality on voter participation and voter attitudes towards redistribution, focusing on how this contributed to party platforms and party electoral strategies. The article concludes by outlining how a post-democracy framework can provide a better understanding for how neoliberal reforms and labour market deregulation have played out in different jurisdictions and how post-democratic developments have influenced the rise of market income inequality.