Air Canada flight attendants are back to work after a three-day strike.
But union leaders are fiercely criticizing the federal government’s back-to-work order, with one calling it “a misuse of government power.”
The strike grounded about 500,000 customers’ flights over the weekend.
Hours after CUPE launched the strike Saturday, Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu ordered the 10,000 workers to end the walkout and sent the two sides to binding arbitration.
The union refused, despite the Canada Industrial Relations Board ruling the strike illegal. The strike ended Tuesday with a settlement reached with a mediator.
But the dispute became a flashpoint for other labour groups, who say it’s the latest example of Ottawa’s new strategy to end strikes and walkouts.
“This is bigger than the flight attendants,” said Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour. “It’s really an attack on worker bargaining power, which has the potential to undermine the Canadian working class.”
McGowan, whose organization represents about 170,000 unionized workers across 26 unions, said Monday the federation was ready to mobilize “aggressively” to support the flight attendants.
Now he’s part of the union movement’s call for the federal government to stop using Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to end strikes without Parliament’s approval.
McMaster University labour researcher Stephanie Ross said that while the tentative agreement marks a win for the flight attendants, the federal government’s readiness to end the labour stoppage reveals the Liberal government’s pro-employer bias.
“This is a group of workers who, through great risk to themselves, drew a line in the sand around the growing misuse of government power,” she said.
Air Canada and the Air Canada Component of CUPE did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
A tense strike
CUPE, or the Canadian Union of Public Employees, has been negotiating a new collective agreement for Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge flight attendants since last December.
Their previous contract had been in effect since 2015. The flight attendants were looking for higher wages and compensation for unpaid work while planes are on the ground.
Flight attendants are paid only while an airplane is in motion, meaning they’re not paid during briefings at the gate, safety checks at the terminal or evacuations.
In March, the union told The Tyee each flight attendant spends up to 35 hours per month working for no money.
Meanwhile, Air Canada said in a press release it has offered 38 per cent in total compensation increases over four years, in part to address the issue of ground work, and that CUPE was seeking unsustainable increases.
The two sides reached an impasse last week. On Aug. 13, CUPE issued a 72-hour strike notice and Air Canada issued a 72-hour lockout notice. Air Canada also announced that it planned to start winding down most of its flights over the next three days.
On Monday Hajdu announced she would use Section 107 to direct the Canada Industrial Relations Board to order the strike ended and send Air Canada and the flight attendants’ union to binding arbitration.
“I am exercising this authority because it is critical to maintaining and securing industrial peace, protecting Canadians and promoting conditions to resolve the dispute,” Hajdu said in a press statement.
Hajdu said she was sending the flight attendants back to work because the labour disruption was grounding passengers and “critical cargo.”
“Canadian families and businesses have already experienced too much disruption and uncertainty, this is not the time to add additional challenges and disruptions to their lives and our economy,” she said.
But the flight attendants stayed on the picket lines.
Despite the labour board ruling the strike illegal, CUPE president Mark Hancock told reporters they would not back down and would even risk jail time to stay on picket lines.
The Canada Labour Congress, a trade union federation representing three million unionized workers, called the government’s back-to-work order “unconstitutional.”
“An attack on one is an attack on all,” president Bea Bruske said in a statement.
“The labour movement is united and standing firm, and we will not allow these Charter-protected rights to be trampled upon.”
On Tuesday, flight attendants went back to work as both sides reached a tentative agreement. Meanwhile, Hajdu announced an investigation into unpaid work in the airline sector.
McMaster University’s Ross said the flight attendants’ willingness to defy the back-to-work order led to a “huge win” and got the company to return to the negotiating table.
“This is a direct lesson that workers’ direct power is still really important and really relevant to winning better working lives,” she said.
She added the workers would likely not have gotten unpaid work addressed during binding arbitration, because the practice is standard in the industry.
“This has the potential to change the practice across the industry,” she said. “It’s going to inspire other groups of flight attendants in North America to fight this, because now they have a comparator.”
Still, unions across Canada said they’re concerned by the government’s new and frequent use of Section 107 to end labour disputes in federally regulated sectors like mining, transportation and telecommunications.
Ottawa’s new labour tool
Hajdu invoked Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code in trying to end the strike and send the parties to arbitration.
Traditionally, members of Parliament debated back-to-work orders in the House of Commons and voted on them before strikes were ended.
But the federal government has increasingly used Section 107 to end strikes in federally regulated industries without parliamentary debate.
Section 107 says the minister can, to secure “industrial peace” or promote conditions favourable to dispute settlement, refer any question to the Canada Industrial Relations Board and direct the board to do whatever the minister deems necessary.
“That is an enormously broad power,” Ross said. “If a dispute is too disruptive, or is not going to be settled... [Section 107] basically gives them the ability to get the board to intervene, or to direct the board to intervene in a particular way.”
While Section 107 has been in the labour code since 1984, it went largely unused until 2011, when then-labour minister Lisa Raitt used it after Air Canada flight attendants twice voted down collective agreements.
But in 2024, Section 107 took on a new life. Former federal labour minister Seamus O’Regan used the legislation to push WestJet engineers to enter binding arbitration ahead of a strike.
Since then, Ottawa has used the legislation to end labour disputes between Teamsters and two major Canadian railways and end a B.C. port strike.
Most notably, former labour minister Steven MacKinnon used Section 107 to postpone the Canada Post workers’ strike last December.
McGowan called the wide use “an abomination.”
“It can’t be stressed enough that this is a new interpretation of this section,” he said. “It flies in the face of Canada’s traditional approach to labour relations.”
CUPE alleged Hajdu’s use of the section violated flight attendants’ Charter rights.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the fundamental freedoms of peaceful assembly and of association.
McGowan says the government’s use of Section 107 undermines union power and violates an 81-year-old social contract between the government unions.
The federal government adopted an industrial relations system in 1944 that set out the existing legal framework for union certification, bargaining, strikes and lockouts.
According to McGowan, this meant unions largely agreed to adhere to the framework and stop using illegal “wildcat” strikes as a bargaining tool.
But the use of Section 107 strips unions of their power to reach a fair deal at the table, McGowan said. He said without the threat of a strike, employers have no motivation to bargain in good faith.
“The only power that workers have is to withdraw their labour,” he said. “If you take that away from them, the workers have no real leverage.”
He joins the Canada Labour Congress in calling for Prime Minister Mark Carney to cease the use of Section 107 to end strikes and cut it from the labour code when Parliament resumes.
“By giving the minister the unilateral right to break strikes and send workers back to work against their will, the minister and the government are making a mockery of the collective bargaining process,” McGowan said.
McGowan said he’s worried the Alberta government will introduce similar wording into its own labour relations code.
BC Federation of Labour president Sussanne Skidmore said she’s proud of the CUPE flight attendants for doubling down on strike action.
“The courage and resolve that they had to win this battle was pretty amazing,” she said.
Skidmore said she’s hoping the federal government ceases its “heavy-handed” approach to ending labour disputes.
“Why would any employer bargain in good faith when they know that the government is going to swoop in and bail them out?” she said.
“There has to be some accountability on the government’s part, for misusing and overusing it, but also for swooping in so fast on these workers who wanted a fair deal.”
McMaster University’s Ross said Hajdu’s decision to invoke Section 107 within 12 hours of the strike’s start shows the new federal government favours employers.
“This signals that what’s important to the government is the work being done, not necessarily the people who do the work,” she said.
Ross said the Canada Post labour dispute is another example of the government’s pro-management bias. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has called for binding arbitration, but Hajdu has yet to use Section 107 to make that happen.
Ross said she doesn’t expect the federal government to immediately make changes to Section 107, but the outcry over its use in the Air Canada strike may mean it’s used less frequently.
“Hopefully, it’ll mean that Section 107 now is not a tool in the tool box of employers, and that employers in the federal sector will feel more pressed to actually bargain seriously and in good faith,” she said.
Ross emphasized that the political victory was won by a group of workers who were primarily women.
Labour market data from the federal government shows 80 per cent of B.C. flight attendants are women.
“These are largely women that were willing to take the biggest risk — of fines, jail time and perhaps losing their jobs — to fight for dignity at work, and we owe them a debt.”
