Same fight, same enemy
I work as a communications advisor for a major union in Quebec. I organize parents at my kids’ school. I sit on a school board. I’m a fairly militant person. And as a political science major, I spend a lot of time thinking about power: who has it, how it moves, and what happens when it gets taken away.
So when I tell you that what is happening right now to workers’ rights in Quebec, and across Canada and the world, feels like something we will look back on with real grief, I am not being dramatic. I am paying attention.
What has unfolded in Quebec over the past two years is not a series of administrative adjustments to labour law. It is a deliberate dismantling of the right to strike, the most powerful tool workers have ever held. The really maddening part is that the same playbook is running simultaneously in Alberta, in Ottawa, in London, in Washington. Different accents, same script: silence workers, protect capital, and pretend it’s in the interest of the former.
Nowhere is this more visible, or more consequential, than in education. The kindergarten teacher managing 25 kids in a crumbling school, the cégep instructor splitting time across three institutions, the university lecturer on a rolling six-month contract, the school support worker who is first on scene for a student in crisis: these workers have become the preferred target of governments that want to break labour power while, with a straight face, claiming it’s in the public interest.
Quebec: Legault Balboa
François Legault’s government started 2025 the way a boxer comes out of the corner in the final round: swinging hard and fast, not particularly interested in what the judges think.
Bill 89, adopted in May 2025 and in force since November 30, gives the Tribunal administratif du travail the power to order the maintenance of “essential services” during a strike, or simply suspend the right to strike altogether at the government’s request. Every major union in Quebec denounced it. Law professor Finn Makela at the Université de Sherbrooke said the quiet part out loud in an article from Pivot: this law is the CAQ’s revenge for the Front commun in 2023-2024, when over half a million workers walked off the job. Teachers, support staff, school psychologists, social workers: out together. They won. And the government did not forget.
Bill 101 (no, not the one you are thinking about), adopted in October 2025, imposed a two-tiered occupational health and safety regime on workers in education and healthcare—the sectors where the government sits across the bargaining table. Think about what that means for a teacher dealing with violent incidents in the classroom, a special education aide working with a student in crisis, a university research assistant in a poorly maintained lab—all of them now covered by weaker protections than workers in other sectors. Not surprisingly, the fines for illegal strike action went up significantly (because of course they did).
Then came Bill 3 (this one made me genuinely angry). Tabled October 30, 2025, it proposes splitting union dues into “principal” and “optional” categories. Core bargaining would be paid out of the principal dues. Everything else—including legal challenges, political advocacy, contesting laws before the courts, donating to charity—becomes “optional,” requiring a separate vote specifically on those subjects. The pretext? Reinforcing union democracy and transparency. The real reason? Getting rid of an annoying check and balance for the government by limiting organized labour advocacy.
This is not reform. It’s the quiet dismantling of the Rand Formula, the post-war compromise that has held Canadian labour relations together since 1945.
Alberta: The template
Quebec did not invent this strategy. It borrowed heavily from Alberta’s Bill 32 in 2020 under the United Conservative Party. Bill 32 imported American-style union restrictions. It buried local unions in financial reporting requirements, made dues for advocacy beyond collective bargaining voluntarily opt-in, and classified everything from lobbying for COVID safety protocols to donating to a food bank as a “political cause” requiring explicit consent from members. For teachers’ unions in Alberta, this was a gut punch: fighting for school funding, pushing for smaller class sizes, opposing education privatization, all of it suddenly classified as political activity requiring specific member authorization. Unifor called it what it was: the worst elements of U.S. labour law transplanted into Alberta, with the goal of draining union financial resources and restricting their ability to do much beyond negotiating collective agreements.
Alberta came back in December 2025 with a revised labour code under Bill 1, again drawing accusations of favouring employers over workers. Province-wide labour action was building heading into 2026. The cycle does not stop because workers keep losing; it stops when they push back hard enough. Alberta isn’t there yet. Quebec is getting close.
Ottawa: Strikebreaking by phone
Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code is the subject of one of the most consequential labour stories of the past two years and far too many people still have no idea it exists.
It is a clause, tucked into federal law since 1984, that gives the Minister of Labour the power to direct the Canada Industrial Relations Board to end a labour dispute and impose binding arbitration, without going to Parliament, without a vote, without any public debate. It sat largely unused for decades until 2024 when the federal government “discovered” it.
In a single year, the federal government invoked Section 107 four times: against port workers in BC and Quebec, against rail workers at CN and CPKC (Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd) ending a lockout that had barely lasted a day, and against Canada Post workers on strike during the holiday season. In August 2025, it hit again: Air Canada flight attendants were ordered back to work less than 12 hours into their strike. A phone call from the Minister. A board ruling. Back to work.
The legal analysis is clear: when the government commits to ending every major work stoppage on economic grounds, employers have no reason to bargain seriously. Why negotiate in good faith when you can stall, lock out your workers, and wait for Ottawa to step in? Air Canada reportedly asked for federal intervention before the strike even started. Once it became clear that the flight attendants, facing fines and potential contempt charges, were going to hold the line regardless, the company reached a deal within 48 hours.
What this means for education workers is worth spelling out. The federal government has now demonstrated in practice that any sufficiently visible work stoppage can be ended by ministerial order. If postal workers can be sent back by phone call, why not university researchers the next time they strike? Why not CUPE members in federally funded institutions? The precedent is there. The tool is there. The question is how far the next government decides to push it.
CUPE, CUPW, the Teamsters, and the Canadian Labour Congress are all in court challenging Section 107. An NDP bill, C-247, calls for its outright repeal. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s 2025 budget proposed changes to collective bargaining for federal workers and announced 40,000 public service job cuts in the same document. The message is consistent: the economy is the priority. Workers are an annoying variable.
The global picture
According to the ITUC’s 2025 Global Rights Index: the right to strike was violated in 131 countries, 87% of those surveyed, 44 more than in 2014. Eighty percent of countries severely restricted the right to collective bargaining. Europe, historically the most protected region, has seen the worst deterioration of any region over the past decade. Canada and the Americas hit their worst scores on record in 2025.
In Britain, the Conservative government’s 2023 Strikes Act gave employers the power to issue “work notices” naming specific workers who, despite having voted to strike, were legally required to show up to work anyway. Teachers were among those targeted. Unions were then required to take “reasonable steps” to enforce compliance among their own members, advising them to comply, and reporting absences to the employer. The general secretary of the National Education Union said his union would strike to force school closures at any school that dismissed NEU members under the legislation. The ITUC ranked the UK at the same level as the United States: “systematic violation of rights.” Of European countries, only Turkey and Belarus received a worse score.
The new Labour government eventually repealed the legislation. But the point had been made: in a wealthy liberal democracy, you can pass a law—without political consequence—that puts teachers in the position of crossing their own picket lines.
In the United States, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 has been restricting the right to strike for nearly 80 years. Secondary boycotts are banned. Employers can permanently replace striking workers, a practice normalized when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981. Trump’s second administration went further: the National Labor Relations Board was rendered non-operational for nearly a year after Trump fired a board member to eliminate its quorum. Over a million federal workers lost their collective bargaining rights by executive order, what one labour historian called the largest single act of union-busting in American history. A Cornell labour expert summed it up: “This is great for employers, they have a non-functioning NLRB.” Meanwhile, university faculty and support staff keep organizing in record numbers—regardless of what Washington does—because the conditions have become untenable .
France, Finland, Belgium, countries with deep post-war social contracts, have all moved to restrict strike action in recent years. This is not a series of unrelated policy choices. It is the same ideological project running at different speeds in different countries.
What these laws actually do
Every one of these laws comes packaged in reasonable language: “balance,” “modernization,” “essential services,” “industrial peace.” I’ve spent enough years in communications to recognize what that packaging is designed to cover.
A strike that causes no disruption changes nothing. Workers’ leverage is the capacity to withdraw their labour and make the withdrawal cost tangible . The moment governments commit to ending every significant work stoppage because it inconveniences the economy, collective bargaining becomes a performance with a known outcome. You negotiate, you reach an impasse, the government steps in for the employer. Rinse and repeat.
The “essential services” expansion is particularly dishonest, and education makes this obvious. Of course teaching is essential. But “essential” has been converted into a legal tool for prohibition. You cannot declare teachers essential to society and then cut their sick leave, stuff 30 kids or more into a classroom, eliminate the school psychologist position, and take away their right to walk out. That is not a social contract.
The dues restrictions, Alberta’s proposed Bill 32, Quebec’s Bill 3, the American right-to-work model they both drew from, are designed to limit what unions can do beyond signing contracts. For education unions specifically, this is serious. Teachers’ unions have historically been among the most active civic institutions in their communities, funding legal challenges to bad laws, pushing back on education privatization, advocating for students who need more resources. That is exactly what these laws prevent.
The legal record
Quebec unions have filed challenges to Law 14. CUPW and CUPE are in Federal Court over Section 107. The NDP has introduced legislation to repeal it. The ITUC is documenting the global pattern.
This resistance is not nothing. It is also not sufficient on its own.
Rights in this country were not legislated into existence by generous governments. The Rand Formula came from a wartime strike in Windsor in 1945, where workers held out long enough that a judge had to build a new legal framework to settle it. The eight-hour day, paid leave, workplace safety standards, the right to a school day where teachers aren’t also doing the work of a secretary, a social worker, and a custodian because the positions were cut: none of it was offered. It was won through sustained collective action.
The CAQ calls its laws modernization. Ottawa calls Section 107 industrial peace. The UCP called Bill 32 democratic transparency. But the actual goal is to make unions smaller, quieter, and less capable of causing problems for employers or governments. The machinery of the state is being used to do what employers have wanted for decades.
The Air Canada flight attendants who kept striking after the back-to-work order understood something basic: a right you won’t defend stops being a right. They took the personal risk, and within 48 hours the company was at the table. The school workers in the Front commun held strong and came out with a better contract. The university lecturers organizing across North America on campuses that treat them as disposable are doing it because the alternative is worse.
I think about all of this when I sit in a parent assembly and listen to people talk about what’s happening in their kids’ classrooms. The fight over conditions in schools and the fight over whether the people who work in those schools have real bargaining power are the same fight. That connection is worth making explicit, before enough of it is gone that people stop noticing.
