Canadian Affiliates of the ITF Canadian Coordinating Committee, representing tens of thousands of transport workers across Canada members of Unifor, Teamsters Canada, SIU Canada, NUPGE, ALPA, CATCA, ILWU, CUPW, BCFMWU met in Toronto on June 26 and have issued the following joint statement.
We meet and gather in challenging times when employers and anti-worker governments are campaigning to limit the right to strike here in Canada and all over the world.
Despite the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2015 ruling that the right to strike is an indispensable component of collective bargaining and protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, multiple employer associations, some which represent employers for which our members work, are putting pressure on the government of Canada to limit the right to strike. Their most recent public campaign aims to link labour disputes and the threat of strike action to the challenges posed by extreme weather events or geopolitical crises to the resiliency of supply chains.
Most recently, employers have shifted their narrative to include the trade war and the renewed attention on regulation in their campaign to eliminate the right to strike. We see their claim as being the same: we reject their attempt to erode our right to collective bargaining and to strike through the imposition of an interest arbitration regime.
We further strongly denounce government action, whether at the provincial or federal level, using overreaching powers to limit workers’ right to strike – whether it is the use of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, Section 33 of the Canadian Constitution (i.e. the notwithstanding clause), or Quebec’s Bill-89.
We celebrate the recent coming into effect of Canada’s first federal anti-scab legislation and collectively commit to defending and upholding its implementation. We will continue to call on the government of Canada and all provinces to respect and adopt similar legislation to level the playing field for workers engaged in collective bargaining.
We pledge to work together to match the coordinated campaign by employers with our own coordinated campaign to defend the right to strike, both here in Canada, and abroad through our mutual work with the ITF.
