Carney’s Union Mistake

On The Air Canada Strike

The decisions taken at the end of the Trudeau to take action to end strikes were, on balance, probably fair; efforts were made to let strikes go on before the damage got too deep at the Port of Vancouver, and a holiday CUPW strike just isn’t acceptable - and in that case, they didn’t enforce a contract, merely punted the strike a few months longer. Those were reasonable and proportionate responses to legitimate crises, the bare minimum test that must be passed to justify intervention.

With those comps in mind, I don’t think the idea that this Air Canada situation cannot become one that requires intervention is true. It definitely might need it at some point, but I don’t think this government has demonstrated that fact in the slightest. Its decision to unilaterally end this labour action is a gross overreach, one that could do lasting damage both to this government’s standing and this country’s tenuous labour peace.

Air Canada is not an essential service, it is one of a number of providers. If the answer is we don’t have enough domestic providers, then the answer is to make the rules more appealing for US carriers to add some all-Canadian routes. But the idea that this is a national crisis that requires the attendant breaking of Charter rights is blatantly nonsensical. Is this strike deeply inconvenient to those people who need to get across the country? Sure, but they’re entitled to have Air Canada rebook them onto competitors flights if they can’t fulfill their obligations, and that should be allowed to happen.

There is no huge economic crisis coming from allowing this strike to continue. There is inconvenience, but if the bar for breaking a strike is “inconvenience” then every strike in the history of humanity was both illegal and unjustified. It’s an imaginary standard being invented to try and kill a bad press story, one that Canadians overwhelmingly think favours the workers. The Abacus poll about this tested the workers’ demands, and found overwhelming majority support for essentially all of them from everybody. If the country found the demands unreasonable, they’d say so - as they often have, especially in Ontario around Teachers. I still remember when the political consensus was that teachers were assholes for wanting pay rises in a bad economy in 2012 - things have changed. The public doesn’t support this strike in spite of the demands, but because of them.

This is also an incredibly shortsighted decision from the government - if they decide that the right to strike functionally ceases to exist, the response won’t be a limit on the number of strikes, but merely a transition from legal strikes to illegal ones. Wildcat strikes will return, and the government will pay the price for their actions both at the ballot box and in lost business confidence. The way we’ve had labour peace in our times is because we’ve known that governments will only legislate strike actions done when it’s necessary - if the government says the rules don’t apply, say goodbye to the unions playing by the rules that the Feds constantly trash.

What do we think will happen to business confidence in this country if there’s wildcat strikes all the time? The point of a legal right to strike is not some gift to the unions out of the kindness of our hearts, but an understanding that predictability and respect for a common rule book will be respected on both sides. Companies will not reward a country with a reputation for wildcat strikes with the kind of Foreign Direct Investment that Carney’s whole economic diversification project is supposed to achieve.

The other problem is political - Carney’s already pissed off the left by firing Nate Erskine-Smith for the ineffectual Minister For Development Charges Are Actually Good, and he’s now creating another crisis for himself. The NDP are moribund and about to elect a leader who will struggle to change that fact, unless we give them an issue that has huge public majorities and even the Conservatives can outflank us to the left on.

I am not a reflexively pro-union person, but even this one is open and shut. There’s no case for Carney’s ineffectualism and cowardice on this front. It’s a bad decision that will serve as a cautionary tale for both the party and the country if it’s not reversed. If Minister Hajdu postpones the strike action a few days to allow people to make alternative travel arrangements before the strike can resume, it would be a reasonable and proportional response to the situation. But this? This is nonsensical.

It’s also worth pointing out that Carney is yet again creating a problem for himself with women. The cuts to Women’s And Gender Equality Canada are mostly a nothing burger so far in reality but bad optics, and now picking a predominantly female industry to bust in favour of the corporate masters is a bad fucking look. I’m not going to say that it’s evidence of actual bias - I think Carney would bust any strike in a federally regulated industry! - but optics don’t really give a fuck about unprovable counterfactuals.

If this gets reversed by Monday the government will survive it. There’s an off-ramp if they want to take it - turn the return to work order to a temporary delay to ensure minimal disruption to people who did nothing wrong - but they have to reverse course on this. Carney’s whole fucking appeal is that he can handle big problems well, but this decision, if not reversed, is likely to create many more problems for the broader Canadian economy than are solved by breaking this strike.

Carney cannot afford to be shortsighted - he needs to see the damage a more combative labour movement will do to corporate Canada and business investment, realize his government’s mistake, and walk this back. You cannot legislate out strikes, you can only legislate out legal ones - and companies would much rather deal with legal strikes and not illegal ones. Fix this, or the consequences are going to be felt for the next decade.