When Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberal Party of Canada ran for re-election in 2025, they made a series of commitments to Canadians promising new investments and good, well-paying jobs for workers.
Yet, one year into office, the Liberal government seems more committed to building a strong economy on the backs of workers rather than for them. In the past six months, the federal government has doubled down on an aggressive form of anti-unionism that threatens to upend the rights of workers and their unions.
The latest is the “Keep Canada Moving” report released by the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications.
Under the auspices of supply chain management and “economic security,” the report examines sections of the Canada Labour Code dealing with the maintenance of activities during a strike or lockout, along with the powers assigned to the Minister of Labour under Section 107.
What is being proposed, under the banner of “modernization,” is a commitment to clamp down on the rights of workers to bargain and strike — an open attack on the right to engage in collective action.
When industry sets the agenda
The Senate committee’s chief recommendation closely resembles demands from the Federally Regulated Employers — Transportation and Communications group, an association representing employers in the rail, marine and communications sectors.
The group has called for a federal backstop to restrict workers’ rights “when nationally critical sectors and supply chains are at stake.”
The result is the Senate’s call for a new Supply Chain Reliability Act. This legislation would create a permanent, specialized supply chain tribunal with the power to impose binding arbitration and completely prohibit a strike or lockout if a dispute “adversely affects the national interest.”
The report also recommends weakening Section 87.4 of the Labour Code by removing the word “immediate” from the criteria required to designate an essential service, which would drastically expand what work can legally be forced to continue during a dispute.
The right to strike
The Supreme Court of Canada recognized that the right to strike is constitutionally protected under Section 2(d) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in a landmark Saskatchewan Federation of Labour ruling in 2015.
The court affirmed that without the right to strike, collective bargaining becomes meaningless. It is the only real leverage workers have to match the structural power of employers. Watering down this right in the name of economic efficiency or supply chain management makes a mockery of workers’ fundamental human rights.
As labour scholars Charles Smith and Larry Savage document in their book, Unions in Court, the constitutionalization of labour rights has always been a double-edged sword.
While the Charter provides a shield for workers, it has simultaneously triggered a response by governments and employer groups. When the courts protect a right, the state often responds by crafting new legal mechanisms to circumvent those protections.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code is one such mechanism. It grants the federal labour minister the power to refer any dispute to the Canada Industrial Relations Board, which can then impose binding arbitration and order striking workers back to work. The federal government has used it against airline, port and rail workers on several occasions over the last decade.
The Senate’s proposed Supply Chain Reliability Act is an iteration of this same pushback. The power to halt strikes shifts from Parliament to an unelected tribunal. This would allow the government to insulate itself from the political turmoil that stems from stripping workers of their constitutional rights.
A renewed attack on workers’ rights
Industry groups argue in their statements to the Senate committee that a specialized tribunal is not anti-worker because it uses alternative dispute resolution models featuring mediators and arbitrators, which are already accepted features of Canada’s labour relations system.
These are industries where workers have a level of influence over arbitrary business decisions due to their capacity to halt services and production without the immediate threat of replacement workers.
Employers know that mandatory arbitration under the threat of economic insecurity would disadvantage labour in these sectors, which is why they have advocated for such a system for decades. And that’s the point: it tips the balance in favour of employer power.
What the Senate committee is proposing doubles down on employer attempts to undermine workers’ rights by institutionalizing ad-hoc political interventions under the banner of economic prosperity.
Coercive employer power is thereby normalized. Why should employers bargain in good faith when they know the state is ready to undercut labour’s power in negotiations? Without the right to strike, workers’ power is short-circuited at the bargaining table.
When all workers are deemed essential
Most jurisdictions in Canada have long-established essential service provisions that prohibit certain workers from striking on public safety grounds. Provided unions are granted access to arbitration, these laws have generally been deemed constitutionally permissible.
It was the Government of Saskatchewan’s decision to withhold this right in the original version of its Public Service Essential Services Act that resulted in the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling.
By stripping the word “immediate” from Section 87.4 of the Canada Labour Code, the Senate is recommending a workaround that would further erode labour’s collective bargaining strength. Currently, the law only allows government to force workers back during a strike if a stoppage poses an “immediate and serious danger to the safety or health of the public.”
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
By removing temporal urgency, the definition of an “essential service” can be expanded from literal life-and-death scenarios to broad economic conveniences as defined by industry itself.
Rewriting essential services legislation is a well-worn mechanism used by Canadian governments to legally neuter strikes before they even begin. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government routinely used back-to-work legislation and amendments to established labour codes to curb the collective strength of workers on several occasions, resulting in an increase in illegal wildcat strikes.
If every railway engineer or port worker is deemed “essential” simply because their absence causes economic friction, the right to strike becomes hollow. What the Senate committee proposes are changes that will ultimately shield federal businesses from the economic disruption that gives strikes their power in the first place.
The path forward for labour
The Senate report notes that our supply chains are interconnected and fragile. But forcing an expanding number of workers to labour under the threat of tribunal-mandated arbitration is not a solution.
Economic prosperity and robust labour rights are not a zero-sum. Supply chain reliability can be built on good-faith collective bargaining, where workers have a genuine voice at the table and the power to withdraw their labour if employers refuse to treat them fairly.
Strikes occur under circumstances shaped, in part, by employer conduct. Mandating arbitration in an American-style labour relations regime, as some of the business groups involved in the hearings suggested, will tilt bargaining even further into the hands of industry.
If the Carney government accepts the recommendations embedded in this report, it will signal a significant retreat from constitutional labour protections. Turning economic inconvenience into an excuse to bypass the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not solve supply chain problems — it requires workers to bear the entire cost of keeping Canada moving.
