Bill C-39 undermines Canadian workers’ right to strike

The Carney government clearly has huge support for its resistance to the U.S. tariff war. However, that support must not hinder us from criticism or from standing up for progressive policies. 

For example, the federal government is once again tipping the collective bargaining scales in favour of management. Labour has argued that Bill C-39 (The Building Canada Strong Act), designed to get Canada building more and faster, introduces changes that trample on collective bargaining rights. This bill has also sparked criticism from Indigenous and environmental groups who claim that human rights and the environment will be endangered. 

The government sides with business when it argues that strikes in the federal jurisdiction (—which covers workers in inter-provincial trucking, telecommunications, shipping, ports, air travel, rail and mail—disrupt the economy and are inconvenient for consumers. Such disruptions are rare and obscure that there are two sides in collective bargaining. Workers argue for better working conditions and wages, and employers do their best to give as little as possible. Sometimes they push to roll back past gains. If collective bargaining is unsuccessful at reaching a settlement agreeable to both sides, the only recourse is a lockout by the employer or a strike by the workers. A lockout is an action by the employer to temporarily close the workplace—locking out the workers—to pressure them in negotiations. 

The vast majority of these negotiations, over 95 per cent, are settled at the bargaining table without industrial action. However, those don’t receive disproportionate media attention. A strike vote, for example, is not the beginning of a strike but, rather, a show of support by the members for their union. However, a strike vote is treated by the media as though a strike is imminent. 

Again, in most cases, the negotiations end with no strike or lockout action. 

Business has lobbied for these changes to shore up business confidence during Canada’s current ‘elbows up’ economic situation with respect to U.S. tariffs. Strikes, they argue, disrupt business, inconvenience the public and undermine confidence in Canada as a place to invest. 

No worker takes a strike lightly. Anyone who has ever been on a picket line, standing up to their employer, knows how unequal their power relationship already is. The ability to collectively refuse to work and join a picket line is workers’ last resort to pressure the employer. 

For workers, a strike is challenging because you are used to working by the employer’s rules, since the workplace is far from a democracy. Strikes also create precarity for workers because they forfeit your paycheque for meagre strike pay and never know if they can win any improvements.

However, it is through strikes that workers have fought for and won the right to limit their hours in the working day, the right to pensions, vacations, overtime pay and so on. That many workers will protest that they still don’t have those rights speaks to the decades-long tipping of the labour relations scale to favour employers over workers. While profits have soared in many sectors, workers’ wages have generally remained flat. Private sector workers, increasingly atomized into self-employed, mainly in the service sector, often remain without union representation.

Some workers sacrificed much during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who couldn’t work remotely, often among the lowest paid workers, were disproportionately exposed to the virus. Some died. Some got ‘hero pay’, usually removed after the pandemic. Those who had to work remotely faced other challenges as the world adapted to an urgent threat. 

After the pandemic, the economy boomed and profits soared. But the workers who had kept us alive in this period found their ‘hero pay’ cut and their wages stagnated. Not surprisingly, in this period, many workers pressed for change; some went on strike. Federal government workers who had kept the country running, either in person or remotely, found their pay entangled in faulty software introduced by the government, and were pressed to both return to in-person work and to keep wage demands low.

The federal government has already intervened many times in federal bargaining disputes. Under section 107 of Part One of the Canada Labour Relations Act, the minister can order workers back to work and send the outstanding issues to an arbitrator. The problem with this is that if the employer knows that the minister will likely intervene, they have less interest in bargaining for a solution. They just have to wait for the government to act. Employers have admitted as much. 

A recent example is the CUPE members who work as Air Canada flight attendants. With a 99 per cent strike vote in support of the union, the workers were determined to make gains in collective bargaining. Air Canada, as the CEO admitted, was expecting the government to act, so they stalled bargaining. When the minister ordered the workers back to work, they defied the order and stayed out on strike.The company was forced to negotiate and only one issue was sent to an independent third party to decide. The subsequent collective agreement was democratically ratified by the workers.

This is the danger of this government’s change to collective bargaining. Employers can just wait until a dispute is seen as very disruptive so that the government gets involved. Imagine in Canada’s tariff negotiations with the U.S. if a third party came in and said that instead of a 50 per cent tariff, Canadians would now only pay 25 per cent. Would that be acceptable? No, of course not. But that is the kind of settlement that a third party could impose in labour management negotiations. 

Federal ministers insist that these changes strengthen the collective bargaining process and that they would never interfere with the right to strike. In fact, they are acquiescing to business demands to reign in unions. Working people across Canada got us through the COVID-19 pandemic and they are putting their elbows up to stand with the government in this current tariff fight. The government would be wise not to abuse that support with Bill C-39. Tipping the scales in collective bargaining in favour of employers could just tip workers’ support away from the bigger tariff effort.

About the author

Peggy Nash

Peggy Nash is a former senior union negotiator, a former member of parliament, and is a senior advisor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her book, Women Winning Office: An activist’s guide to getting elected, is available at Between the Lines.