Supporting Collective Bargaining, Unless it Works: The Past and Present of Federal Labour Rights Suppression in Canada

Christo Aivalis

This is the third and final post in the Canada Post and Canadian Culture series.

Canada Post and its employees have had an undeniable impact on the culture of this country, both via the artistry and symbolism on stamps, and also as an essential facilitator of communication across a vast and diverse nation. From my perspective as a labour and political historian, however, Canada Post and other federal government jobsites have often been a laboratory wherein governments have experimented with ways to restrict the right to strike and bargain collectively, even though those rights are now[i] protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At times, examples set by the federal government to suppress workers’ rights have been followed by employers in the private sector and in other government jurisdictions.

Because of this Charter recognition, and the negative optics of attempting a total ban on labour rights, governments have implemented various tools to quietly diminish the rights workers do have, especially in cases where workers—via unions like Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)—are actually in a position to achieve victories. Indeed, the victories of unions like CUPW, including maternity leave in 1981, have taught Liberal and Conservative governments alike that they must be careful in explicitly and violently curtailing rights, lest they create martyrs and public sympathy, like when CUPW President Jean-Claude Parrot was jailed in 1979.

Thus, in the postwar era, federal governments have gradually moved away from cracking skulls and locking people up and towards using subtle bureaucratic tools to achieve their objectives more discreetly. During Pierre Trudeau’s time in power, this was achieved under the dubious guise of inflation control, but it continues today with back-to-work legislation, along with the more insidious Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.

While Pierre Trudeau has a reputation for being pro-labour given his years of labour union activity in Quebec in the 1950s, by the time he became prime minister, he had grown convinced that unions had gotten too powerful, and their workers too rich. Thus, four different programs were set up to effectively stop workers from being able to bargain collectively, which in turn limited the value and efficacy of being able to strike. The first was voluntary wage and price controls, via the Prices and Incomes Commission (PIC). The second was a hard cap on all collective agreements via the Anti-Inflation Board (AIB) from 1975 to 1978. The third was a late-1970s attempt to impose bargaining formulas on federal public servants via an average comparability of total compensation (ACTC) scheme. The final effort, undertaken in the early 1980s, was the “Six and Five” anti-inflation program (6&5), which hard-capped federal public-sector wages well below inflation. While I covered each of these programs in detail in a previous Labour/le travail article, the broad point is that each of these programs preserved the “song and dance” of bargaining, but only when workers were weak. When the government (or a private-sector employer covered under some of these schemes[ii]) was well-positioned to win in a round of bargaining by extracting concessions or keeping demands low, the freedom of collective bargaining was celebrated as a sign that workers had rights.

When it came to voluntary controls, they were never on a platform of fairness. Trudeau wanted unions to sign deals with wages below inflation; in turn, big companies would promise not to raise prices beyond inflation. But this handcuffed workers, because collective agreements were legal contracts often lasting many years, while companies “pinky-swearing” to not raise prices was a promise based entirely upon goodwill, revocable at any time. Later plans like the AIB that forced caps on wages also applied to prices in theory, but they proved much harder to control than binding collective agreements, meaning that workers fell behind. Similarly, when it came to the proposed ACTC mechanism, workers would be told the maximum they were allowed to have via a point system, and bargaining would be used to keep them below that line. Workers could negotiate how to allocate the ratio between wages and benefits, but never seek to increase the total amount of compensation they got, no matter how hard they bargained or struck. In this model, benefits such as more vacation time could never be won in isolation: they would have to be offset by accepting lower wages or some other concession.

In all of this, it’s important to re-state how the process of strikes and bargaining kept humming along, but mostly as ceremony in cases where workers had the potential to win. When employers had the upper hand, bargaining maintained its true adversarial and free characteristics.

In the modern era, interventions have mostly been aimed at the right to strike, and enforced less by high-profile arrests and more via fines. Here, the same vision often applies. In cases where workers have gone on strike, the federal government has often quickly intervened to enforce discipline and help the employer, be it a company or themselves. Usually, the way they have constrained workers is via back-to-work legislation, wherein Parliament votes to end a strike. These efforts were used in recent years during the tenure of the Harper Conservative government and the early Justin Trudeau years.

But given that these votes are often contentious, governments of late have used Section 107 of the Labour Code, which effectively allows the Minister of Labour to unilaterally enforce back-to-work provisions without a vote. This was the provision that the Carney Liberals used against the Air Canada flight attendants represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). It has been used no fewer than 8 times since 2024 to stop the free operation of collective bargaining, all without a vote by Members of Parliament. This is why New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Leah Gazan is proposing Bill-247 to end Section 107 abuses of labour rights.

As CUPW said in their statement of support for this bill, the status quo allows the choreography of labour negotiations to play out, but largely in the employers’ favour:

Section 107 is an affront to workers’ most basic rights to free and fair collective bargaining. The power to end a legal strike should not be at the whim of the Minister responsible for labour. Trampling workers’ Charter rights and the entire Canada Labour Code with the click of a button is no way to secure “industrial peace.” Like back to work legislation, the Government’s repeated misuse of Section 107 is another tool used to tip the balance of power in employers’ favour. When employers know they can fall back on the Government for support, they have no reason to seriously negotiate. In our own case, repeated government interventions have only delayed the bargaining process, pushed problems and issues to further rounds of bargaining and undermined postal workers’ trust in the government.

In a free and democratic society, most everyone recognizes at least in theory that workers have rights, and that those rights include the ability to join a union that fights for their benefit using bargaining and even strikes. Thus, we see the game: unions like CUPW and others have all the rights in the world… on paper. But as soon as they exercise those rights to win, the hammer comes down. This is why the legal recognition of labour rights, however important, impactful, and hard-won, aren’t everything. Workers must have the power to win even when in discordance with the law, and only organizing and solidarity can achieve that.

Christo Aivalis, a former Active History Editor, is a political commentator and historian, holding a PhD in Canadian History from Queen’s University. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, The Breach, Canadian Dimension, Ricochet, Maclean’s, the Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post.

[i] To be clear, the Right to Strike, and the Right to Bargain Collectively, were not always recognized as covered under the Charter. They are not explicitly listed, and early decisions in the 1980s excluded them. They only became included in decisions in the late 2000s and early 2010s. See Larry Savage & Charles Smith, Unions in Court: Organized Labour and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (UBC Press, 2017).

[ii] The scope and coverage of each program differed. The PIC was largely aimed at getting agreements from companies and unions, both federal and provincial in jurisdiction. The AIB was the broadest, as it applied to every unionized workplace, including private companies under provincial jurisdiction using emergency federal powers. Trudeau also applied this to large employers even when non-union. The 6&5/ACTC systems were only explicitly aimed at federal public workers, but Trudeau coordinated with provinces and the private sector to implement similar schemes.