Carney's labour law overhaul sparks union backlash over strike rights

Prime Minister Mark Carney is moving fast. With Donald Trump's tariffs squeezing Canada's economy and trade talks frozen since August, Carney introduced Bill C-39 last month—the Building Canada Strong Act—promising investors the speed and certainty they need to commit capital and build projects without delay. The bill streamlines approvals for major infrastructure. It also does something else: it gives Ottawa clearer legal grounds to step into strikes and lockouts in federally regulated workplaces, invoking a concept called the "national interest" as justification. That provision has put Carney directly at odds with Canada's largest unions, who see it as a fundamental threat to workers' ability to bargain.

The conflict is not new. Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code already allows the Labour Minister to intervene in disputes to maintain what the law calls "industrial peace." Since 2024, Ottawa has used that power eight times—stepping into airline disputes, railway lockouts, port strikes, and Canada Post negotiations. In August 2025, when more than 10,000 Air Canada flight attendants voted overwhelmingly to strike over contract terms, the government invoked Section 107 within 12 hours. Air Canada's CEO later told reporters the airline had expected the intervention and had not prepared a contingency plan for an actual work stoppage. The Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents 800,000 workers across hospitals, schools, and municipal services, saw the same pattern: employers stalling at the bargaining table, betting that Ottawa would do the heavy lifting for them.

Carney's bill does not repeal Section 107 or restrict it, as unions had hoped. Instead, it adds procedural steps: the government must appoint a mediator, wait for a public report, and determine whether a stoppage truly threatens the national interest before invoking the power. The Prime Minister has said this "absolutely reinforces the right to strike." Unions reject that framing entirely. The problem, they argue, is not the procedure—it is the standard itself. Who decides what counts as a threat to national interest? The minister does. And once that threshold is crossed, the government can order the Canada Industrial Relations Board to force operations to resume and impose binding arbitration. Larry Savage, a labour studies professor at Brock University, put it plainly: employers will learn a simple lesson. Hold out long enough, emphasize the economic damage, and Ottawa will strip away the union's leverage. A strike's power lies in disruption. Remove the threat of disruption, and you remove the strike.

Teamsters Canada pointed to the 2024 railway lockouts as evidence. When CN and CPKC locked out thousands of workers, the union says the companies were counting on government intervention—and Section 107 was invoked within hours. Christopher Monette, Teamsters Canada's director of public affairs, told Al Jazeera that employers have now internalized a dangerous expectation: if a labour dispute arises, wait for Ottawa to step in. CUPE's national president, Mark Hancock, credited Carney's handling of Trump and said his union's 800,000 members want to be part of "Team Canada." But he asked the harder question: at what cost?

The strike debate sits inside a much larger argument about who gets a say in how fast Canada changes. Critics, including NDP leader Avi Lewis, accuse Carney of using the trade war as cover to push through measures he never campaigned on and could never pass under normal political conditions. A week before C-39 was introduced, Toronto hosted Canada's first national investment summit. Inside, hundreds of global investors pitched deals with government officials. Outside, hundreds of protesters marched under the banner "The Many vs The Money," bringing together labour, Indigenous, environmental, and migrant-rights groups. The rally targeted fossil fuel projects, military spending, AI initiatives, and the use of public money to attract private capital. For unions, C-39 crystallized the tension: the government was trading workers' bargaining power for investor confidence.

But the economic case for that trade-off is weaker than it appears. Jim Stanford, an economist and director of the Vancouver-based Centre for Future Work, examined the actual impact of strikes on Canada's economy. Work stoppages can hurt individual companies, he said, but it is "very, very rare" to see a noticeable and sustained impact on GDP, employment, or incomes. Production and transportation are delayed, not permanently lost. Businesses catch up once work resumes. More than 95 percent of collective bargaining ends without a strike at all. And there is, Stanford said plainly, "no empirical evidence whatsoever" that strikes have reduced investment in Canada. The government, he suggested, is offering business a gift that economic necessity does not demand.

There is also an economic cost to weakening strike power that Carney's bill does not address. Workers need bargaining leverage to win higher wages, which fuel consumer spending, boost productivity, and improve worker retention. Weaken that leverage in the name of labour peace, and workers' share of economic gains shrinks. That hurts the broader economy. Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, framed it as a question of national strength: "Canada's unions are part of Team Canada. We have our elbows up. But we can't have our elbows up against Trump with our hands tied at the bargaining table." Savage went further, arguing that the government's Team Canada rhetoric risks treating workers' bargaining power as a liability rather than an asset. "I don't think Canada becomes stronger," he said, "by telling workers in ports or railways or airlines that their rights have to be surrendered whenever employers invoke competitiveness or the national interest." The bill is expected to move through Parliament, and the question now is whether unions will follow through on CUPE's threat to defy its provisions if passed without amendment.