Every election, many working men and women in Alberta cast their ballots for Conservative and Liberal and even (federally) Alliance candidates. Although I would like to believe otherwise, I don’t think there is a significant difference between the voting patterns of unionized workers and non-unionized workers.

Many union members obviously believe that this is as it should be – that their union or others in the labour movement have no right to try to sway their votes to labour’s political arm, the New Democratic Party.

For some strange reason, it is quite all right for large corporations to pour millions of dollars into the Liberal and Conservative and Alliance coffers so that they can run slick advertising campaigns to get you to vote for the party of their choice. But it is some sort of breach of democratic rights for working peoples’ organizations to either donate to a Party or to try to mobilize votes for a Party.

This just doesn’t make sense to me. The most basic principle that labour is founded upon is collective action. One worker alone is at the mercy of the employer – all workers together force employers to operate on a nearly level playing filed. The same holds true in politics.

If workers vote separately, their vote and political influence is spread all over the spectrum and lost. But, when workers vote in a block, their political power can dominate.

This is such an obvious truth that it should come as no surprise that labour political parties have been in existence since working men got the vote in this country in 1897 (working women didn’t get the vote until twenty years after that).

The Dominion Labour Party, the Canadian Labor Party, the Workingmen’s Party and the People’s Political Party were all early attempts by Canadian workers to create a political vehicle for working people.

If you add the various progressive political parties whose aim was to advance the rights of working people, like the Canadian Socialist Party and Social Democratic Party, you can see how prevalent the idea of a workers’ party actually has been in Canada.

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was actually an alliance of labour, socialist and farmers’ parties. Unions could and did affiliate as locals to the CCF.

What was the consequence of this political unity among workers? A provincial CCF government in Saskatchewan that created our modern Medicare system and set the stage for the creation of the New Democratic Party in 1961.

The NDP is basically a formal union between the Canadian Labour Congress and the old CCF. The whole idea of the NDP has always been to provide a vehicle for the collective strength of working people.

The NDP’s popularity with workers has risen and fallen over the years. Like any institution it has been subject to mistakes and misdirection. But, when the NDP is high in the opinion polls, it is an iron clad guarantee that working people will get better treatment from governments. When the New Democrats are in power, workers have benefited. This has been true in B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba and (yes) even Ontario.

Even when the New Democrats have just threatened to take power federally, the ruling Liberals have quickly passed reasonable facsimiles of New Democrat policies like Canada Pension, EI, Medicare, and social housing.

What I’m saying is that it not only makes theoretical sense for unions and workers to exercise their collective political strength by supporting the NDP – it makes real practical sense.

So this election let the corporate sector vote for the Tories and the Liberals. Let the Chamber of Commerce types vote for the Parties they finance. But lets have working people vote for and financially support the only Party that speaks for us because it was founded by us, the NDP.