Among the nastiest aspects of Canadian unions is their habit of timing strikes to when these will cause the most harm and stress to innocent parties. Two weeks ago Friday, as the busy holiday shopping season was gathering steam, 55,000 Canada Post workers went on strike. A stunning 10 million parcels went undelivered within just one week, leaving individuals and thousands of Canadian small businesses scrambling to make alternative arrangements. This is not an easy task as, even in the era of near-instant package delivery, the cost of courier services such as FedEx and UPS is prohibitive for shipping ordinary items. And while courier competitor Purolator has somewhat lower rates, it is owned by Canada Post and is also unionized – and the Teamsters Canada union (to which the Canadian Union of Postal Workers belongs) prohibited its members from handling packages identified as coming from Canada Post.
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, handling just 2.3 billion pieces of regular mail last year, down from 5.5 billion in 2006. Direct marketing volume is also down considerably and parcel service, after growing in the late-2010s, has fallen off. Last week Canada Post reported losing $315 million in the third quarter (after losing $748 million last year), with 2024 on-track to become 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. The latest strike has reportedly caused a severe drop in holiday-related retail business. “[Consumers] unsure about delivery timelines are staying away from shopping altogether,” says Corrine Pohlman, vice president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. “It’s just the next big obstacle our members must deal with.”
Moreover, Service Canada has 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 are also affected. Provincially issued documents like health insurance cards and driver’s licences are piling up. Charities are already feeling the drop in incoming cheques and pledge forms from individual Canadians. The service interruption might even hinder an upcoming provincial byelection in Alberta, since some voters cast their ballots by mail. 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.
Christmas 2024 will cap a year of severe labour unrest. Canadians have had to endure a series of over 120 work stoppages launched in the first nine months of this year by workers ranging from airline mechanics to meatpackers to school support employees to forest firefighters. In August, for example, after failing to reach an agreement following nine months of negotiations, the nation’s two largest railways, 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 across the country – locked out their unionized workers, disrupting the billion-dollar-per-day Canadian railway system. The federal government issued a back-to-work order a week later, but the damage in that short time was severe.
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.
Most damaging of all are port strikes. Most of Canada’s global (non-U.S.) trade funnels through two major ports: Vancouver and Montreal. Halifax and Prince Rupert, B.C. are much smaller, and while some West Coast trade can be diverted via Seattle, this is costlier and has significant limitations. This makes Canada highly vulnerable to strike action at even one major port. On November 4, Port of Vancouver officials locked out unionized workers after they rejected an offer of a 19.6 percent wage increase over four years, disrupting $800 million per day in shipments. A week later Port of Montreal dockworkers walked out, disrupting a further $400 million in daily shipments, bringing the total port shutdown toll to $1.2 billion per day. The federal government issued a second back-to-work order on November 19.
That is bad enough, but measuring the impact of dock and rail strikes purely in terms of reduced throughput significantly understates the hardship to businesses that count on shipped goods to replenish their inventories, keep their machinery and equipment operating and generally keep their businesses afloat. Transportation shutdowns disrupt the entire supply chain for manufacturers and retailers, affecting the whole economy.
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. The negative impacts reverberate through an economy already at a major disadvantage to its largest trading partner. Only 10 percent of American workers are unionized compared to 30 percent in Canada (including 75 percent of public-sector workers). This is yet another reason why Canada’s per capita productivity rate, a key indicator of a society’s standard of living, is 30 percent lower than in the U.S.
Are unions in Canada creating a have/have not division among the nation’s workers? And do they care about the have-nots? The evidence suggests the answers are “yes” and “no”. There’s ample information supporting these conclusions, and here’s just one example. With more than a quarter-million members in Canada, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) are Canada’s largest private-sector union. And as their website states, “Union workers make an average $190 more per week and are more likely to have jobs that provide health insurance, paid vacation, holidays and sick leave, scheduling overtime protection and other benefits and have more rights that protect them on the job than non-union workers.”
That $190 per week totals nearly $10,000 per year. Making so much more than comparable workers in similar industries all sounds great, provided that the nature of the work fits into the model and employers can afford it. It comes 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.
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. 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. Then, the often months-long spectre of strike action preceding each contract renewal puts everyone dependent on them on edge. And when the strikes start – wham!
It was predictable that the Liberals and NDP would support the ban on replacement workers but, despite the pointed (almost desperate) pleas of employer and business organizations to oppose the bill, the Conservatives also voted for it.
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. On June 20, 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 strolling into a facility and keeping it operating has an uncanny power to persuade unions to return to the bargaining table, temper their demands, negotiate a livable deal and get their members back on the job.
It was predictable that the Liberals and the NDP (as well as the even more left-wing Greens and Bloc Québecois) would support the ban on replacement workers but, despite the pointed (almost desperate) pleas of employer and business organizations to oppose the bill, the Conservatives – surprisingly, bizarrely and very distressingly – also voted for it. “The legislation shows only that politicians value certain privileged unionized workers,” observed columnist Matthew Lau in the National Post. “They do not value other members of the labour force who are more disadvantaged, less privileged and have less political power.” The new legislation will increase labour confrontations and make strikes more likely, not less.
Mediation talks between Canada Post and the union were suspended on Wednesday, making a bad situation even worse. And, of course, the corporation is prohibited from hiring replacement workers or maintaining even partial mail delivery using non-unionized managers and contractors. 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.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
Source of main image: Shutterstock.
Why did Canada Post’s workers go on strike?
Will Canada Post’s strike delay international parcels?
Yes, the Canada Post strike will affect delivery of international parcels because disruptions in processing facilities are causing delays in sorting and delivering shipments entering Canada.
