The left's interest in the reorganisation of work and new managerial practices is party linked to their potential for advancing industrial democracy but there is also a broader sense that the kind of economic restructuring associated with such changes — variously called "high value-added" or "post-Fordist" —could mean the revitalisation of high wage economies like Canada's to the extent that competitiveness is defined in terms of quality and innovative capacity, not wage costs. Yet there is nothing automatic about the benefits of post-fordist restructuring: the contours of post-fordism are being shaped through struggles in which unions have a particularly important part to play. This paper provides an initial assessment of the capacity of unions to determine the parameters of post-fordist restructuring in Canada and, more specifically, Ontario.