The Buf Stops Here

Dan "Buf" MacLennan resigns as President of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE). Yesterday's article in the Globe and Mail declared MacLennan the "bad boy of Alberta labour". This page at one time was active in Alberta's labour movement, and met the outgoing AUPE President on numerous occasions. I found him not so much a 'bad boy' as a man who just didn't get it. Simple trade union concepts like "An injury to one is an injury to us all" or "solidarity" were completely lost on him.

After the 1993 Alberta election, President Carol Anne Dean fashioned AUPE into the only real Opposition to the "Klein Revolution". When MacLennan staged his coup in 1997, the union quickly threw out any notions of grassroots democracy, political action or social responsibility in favour of top-down, collaborationist business unionism. When the Klein Tories sought to privatize hospitals through Bill 11, only a handful of AUPE activists showed up at the Legislature rallies in Edmonton and joined the fight for public health care. Under MacLennan, the rest of AUPE treated the crisis as an opportunity for organizing health care workers, whether or not they were already members of another union.

This page shudders to think how MacLennan, if he was President of BCGSEU instead of AUPE, would have handled the fallout from the Campbell Liberals' Bill 29, which decimated the ranks of the Hospital Employees Union. Whereas George Heyman had the common sense and the wherewithal to tell the Liberals and the Health Authourities to step off, this page is certain that MacLennan would have been viciously elbowing Dave Haggard and the IWA out of position to sign up the 'new' cleaning and kitchen staff at BC hospitals.

It's ironic for Ralph Klein to say that MacLennan refrained from being "adversarial", when in fact, MacLennan's tenure as a prison guard set the tone for his adversarial, polarizing leadership. "Buf" surrounded himself with syncophants from his own Local 3 (Corrections), repeatedly called down members of the Provincial Executive who disagreed with him, traded on his personality cult with Alberta's right-wing media, and used the convention podium as a bully pulpit. Even if he relished playing the stereotypical "union boss", MacLennan seldom if ever went after employers. Instead, "Buf's" favourite targets were CUPE, the Alberta Federation of Labour and the NDP. MacLennan's lack of confrontation with employers could be because that in 2000, while his union was signing up record numbers of new members in a booming Alberta economy, AUPE was insisting on bargaining concessions from their own support staff.

As a result of his celebrity and reputation for being someone the Old Boys Club could play ball with, MacLennan's name was repeatedly mentioned in Alberta's political circles as a potential member of the Legislature or Parliament. It must be disappointing for his supporters to watch the President of Canada's largest public sector company union take on the role of a corporate head hunter. However, given his disdain for progressive trade union principles and his proven ability at hunting heads to swell AUPE's ranks, "Buf" is certainly the right man for the job.