This week, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government introduced legislation aimed at enhancing the rights of workers.
The bill has many positive elements, including measures to expedite the foreign credential recognition process for skilled immigrants, open pathways to the skilled trades and make construction sites more hospitable for women. It also includes some less positive measures, such as an unusual requirement for companies to inform job applicants they’ve interviewed if they haven’t been selected for a job.
The legislation is emblematic of conservative parties’ increasing efforts to appeal to working class voters. It also illustrates the opportunities and challenges of this strategy.
As a number of think tanks and media outlets have observed, conservative parties at both the federal and provincial levels have increasingly focused on attracting working class voters. Historically, this class has largely voted NDP. However, data indicate this support has fallen gradually since the early 2000s and significantly since 2019.
Conservatives are smart to try to appeal to these millions of voters. And many of their proposals have the potential to be effective.
Ontario’s new legislation builds on progress from four previous Working for Workers acts introduced in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Its measures to recognize foreign credentials and encourage work in the trades are necessary (and overdue) responses to major problems. These problems include acute shortages of health-care professionals and tradespeople, issues that have been exacerbated by surging immigration.
For their part, Pierre Poilievre Conservatives’ have promised to boost housing densification along transit hubs, which working-class workers are more likely to use on long commutes. He’s also promised to expedite the foreign credential recognition process for new immigrants, who often start out as working class.
But in their effort to appeal to workers, there is a risk that conservative parties will also resort to fundamentally unconservative tools. These tools, while superficially popular, can be inefficient, distortive and untargeted.
For example, Ontario’s new requirement to notify unsuccessful job applicants sounds innocuous, but is not a good law. Organizations should of course treat interviewees, employees, customers and others courteously (which is the stated rationale for the rule). But it is not the role of the state to legislate courteous behaviour.
Unnecessary laws like these add to companies’ regulatory burden, which has direct and indirect costs. Over time, they increase companies’ compliance costs and foster an unattractive investment climate. Laws also carry resource implications for governments, requiring them to implement education, monitoring and enforcement measures.
Other policies ostensibly directed at the working class raise even greater concerns.
Chief among these are the astronomically large government handouts to manufacturing facilities such as EV factories. Most recently, Premier Doug Ford said the province would kick in $2.5 billion in direct and indirect incentives to support Honda’s construction of four EV plants in Ontario. That is an absurd way to support the estimated 1,000 new manufacturing jobs expected to arise from the deal.
Similarly, Ottawa’s subsidized child-care program — which has been signed onto by conservative and liberal provinces alike — is proving to be something of a fiasco. As Canadian Affairs’ reporting has shown, subsidized child care is often failing to help the low-income families who most need support. It is pushing chid-care operators to the brink of bankruptcy and forcing them to cut services. And it is resulting in shortages in both child-care spaces and early education workers.
Worse, research by The Hub media outlet and think tank Cardus has shown that working-class parents — who are most likely to work evenings, weekends and irregular hours — are least likely to benefit from subsidized child care, which generally caters to parents who work 9 to 5:00 hours.
If conservatives are serious about supporting workers, they need to address the macro-economic, social and technological challenges that affect the livelihoods and living standards of all workers.
This must necessarily include a plan to address Canada’s biggest economic problem — lagging productivity. It must include a more sensible approach to supporting low-income parents who need child care. And it must include a plan for ensuring workers (both blue-collar and white-collar) are poised to succeed in an AI-dominated world.
So yes, we want governments and political parties that care about the well-being of workers. But that must come with an understanding of where government action is needed, and where it’s not.
