In an era of constrained budgets and competitive challenges, Canada’s beleaguered economy has become beset with strikes called by unions demanding double-digit wage hikes. The cost to our economy and society is becoming unsustainable, and powerful unions are increasingly dividing Canada into a nation of “haves” – overpaid unionized workers – and “have nots” – everyone else.
Nowhere is this divide more evident than in the recent strike by Canada Post workers – a 55,000-strong union demanding a 24 percent wage increase over four years. A stunning 10 million parcels went undelivered in just the first week of the strike, leaving individuals and thousands of Canadian small businesses scrambling to make alternative arrangements. Service Canada had to hold off mailing out 85,000 passports, forcing many Canadians to cancel travel plans they had already paid for. Pension and financial assistance cheques have been affected, and charities have felt the drop in incoming cheques and pledge forms. Such damage is on top of the business losses that will be incurred by Canada’s already-struggling retail sector – and the potential tears from missing gifts on Christmas Day. This strike shows Canada’s unions at their worst: heartless, greedy, selfish and plain awful.
It is common to laugh or sneer when the words “Canada Post” come up. The nation’s once-proud mail service has been on a long downward slide; it lost $315 million in the third quarter and is headed for its seventh straight year in the red. But whenever a strike hits and Canada Post stops operating, it becomes instantly clear that it remains an essential service.
But this isn’t just about one strike. According to Statistics Canada, the nation is in the midst of a huge multi-year wave of strikes and lockouts, with the key metric of “person days not worked” more than quadrupling from 1,451,556 in 2020 to 6,584,618 last year. This year is shaping up to be another bad one, with over 700 work stoppages and over 400,000 workers off the job through the end of October. That includes workers at the nation’s two largest railroads, Canadian Pacific and Canadian National, which represent the only economically viable shipping option for tens of thousands of farms, commercial enterprises and major industrial facilities. And the country’s two biggest ports, Vancouver and Montreal, saw labour disputes in November that disrupted $1.2 billion in shipments per day.
While unions claim to advocate for fairness, their wage demands and disruption tactics create a stark divide between the “haves” in unionized jobs and the “have-nots” who are left to shoulder the economic burden. The average unionized worker in Canada earns $10,000 more annually than their non-union counterparts, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. The disparity might be justified in competitive industries where employers can afford it. It should come as no surprise that the unionized workers wreaking the greatest havoc are employed by huge, federally regulated monopolies like railways and ports – and Canada Post, a government-owned monopoly that’s particularly important to average Canadians and small businesses.
Even when their employees are on the job, everyone else pays more for the goods and services they provide in order to enrich those workers. Such arrangements make victims out of virtually all non-union businesses and their customers – the have-nots. Canada’s unionized monopolies are both dividing and slowly destroying our country.
We urgently need our elected representatives to declare Canada’s railways, ports and mail service to be essential services prohibited from striking, perhaps even from unionizing altogether. This list should also include health-care workers, police, firefighters and electricity supply workers. Unfortunately, our legislators have made union domination even worse. In June, the Justin Trudeau government passed legislation banning replacement workers in federally regulated workplaces such as Crown corporations, banks, railways, airlines and television broadcasters – collectively covering over 1 million workers or what one analyst called “the backbone of Canada’s economic infrastructure.”
Turning to replacement workers is a critical tool for strike-bound employers to avoid being completely shut down and thereby blackmailed by unions; the sight of replacement workers has an uncanny power to persuade unions to return to the bargaining table, negotiate a livable deal and get their members back on the job. It was predictable that the Liberals and the NDP would support the ban on replacement workers but, despite the pointed (almost desperate) pleas of employer and business organizations, the Conservatives – surprisingly, bizarrely and very distressingly – also voted for it. The new legislation will increase labour confrontations and make strikes more likely, not less.
With every federal party having signed onto this madness, the only action left for beleaguered “have-nots”, it seems, is waging a personal protest campaign expressing our outrage to those who are supposed to be representing our interests.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
