NP View: Liberals must end Air Canada labour dispute immediately

The clock is ticking as Air Canada and its pilots’ union barrel toward a strike that will seriously disrupt the country’s transportation system. Unless Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon acts quickly, flight cancellations could begin as early as Sunday, leading to the suspension of the airline’s 670 daily domestic and international flights, which typically carry over 110,000 passengers a day.

Thankfully, a firm precedent has already been set over the past few months, which have seen the federal government move to stop a series of strikes at WestJet, Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian National Railway that threatened to grind Canada’s transportation network to a halt.

Yet although the minister intervened in those cases, ultimately sending them to binding arbitration, it was done too late to prevent work stoppages that cost the economy millions and took weeks to bounce back from. MacKinnon must learn from the mistakes of the past and intervene now to ensure an equitable deal can be reached between the two parties without causing major disruptions to travellers.

At the end of June, WestJet found itself in a similar situation to the one Air Canada is currently facing after talks broke down with the union that represents around 700 of its aircraft mechanics. The airline started cancelling flights in anticipation of a work stoppage on June 27, but believed the strike had been averted when then-labour minister Seamus O’Regan ordered that the dispute be sent to binding arbitration later that day.

The minister, however, made a fatal mistake: he ordered the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to “assist the parties in reaching a settlement … by imposing final binding arbitration to resolve outstanding terms of the collective agreement,” but didn’t mention anything about preventing workers from walking off the job. The CIRB thus ruled a strike lawful on June 28, paving the way for the mechanics to hit the picket lines later that day.

Though a deal was ultimately reached a couple days later, it caused hundreds of flight cancellations over the Canada Day long weekend, affecting an estimated 110,000 passengers.

Determined not to make the same mistake as his predecessor, when the CN and CP shutdowns began on Aug. 22, MacKinnon, according to CIRB rulings, explicitly ordered workers back on the job and for the railways to resume operations.

Nonetheless, given that the minister waited until after the companies had locked out their employees, the rail network was shut down for days, affecting commuter and passenger traffic in Ontario and Quebec, and halting the shipment of $1 billion worth of a goods a day. The backlog was expected to take weeks to clear out.

Fast forward a few weeks and here we are again, with another labour dispute threatening to ground a major federally regulated transportation company — in this case, one that controls over 40 per cent of the air-travel market.

Given how the WestJet and railway strikes concluded, it’s a virtual inevitability that the labour minister will intervene to put a halt to an Air Canada strike. Yet as of Wednesday, MacKinnon’s spokesperson was still spouting off about how it’s “incumbent on both parties to work together to reach an agreement.”

We agree that in a perfect world, this dispute would be settled at the bargaining table, and we understand the desire to give the two parties as much time as possible to come to their own agreement. But the airline said on Monday that the two sides are still “far apart,” which does not inspire much confidence in the prospect of a negotiated settlement. Moreover, the federal government shoulders much of the blame for the mess we currently find ourselves in.

Rules limiting foreign ownership in Canadian airlines and preventing foreign carriers from flying domestic routes, along with an antiquated airport ownership structure and high government rents that result in exorbitant airport fees, have allowed Air Canada to maintain its oligopolistic market share for decades. And the prohibition on hiring replacement workers that Parliament passed in the spring further prevents federally regulated companies from continuing operations in the event of a work stoppage.

In other words, although private-sector labour disputes should generally be left to the companies and unions involved, Ottawa has created a situation in which two firms control an outsized share of the air-transport market, making any strikes more disruptive than they should be, while simultaneously reducing their bargaining power by strengthened the hands of their unions.

Given that the minister is almost certain to intervene in this dispute, there is simply no excuse for him not to act before Sunday, when the union will be in a position to issue a 72-hour strike notice. Even waiting until the last minute may be too late to prevent economically disruptive flight cancellations.

It is thus incumbent upon MacKinnon to use his power under Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code — which allows the minister to do whatever he thinks is necessary to “maintain or secure industrial peace and to promote conditions favourable to the settlement of industrial disputes” — to send a clear message to the airline and its pilots that a strike will not be tolerated, and instruct the CIRB to impose binding arbitration on the parties.