FLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN: THE FIRST MAJOR ERROR OF CARNEY’S TENURE
Barging into the Air Canada labour dispute on the side of the employer is a serious political miscalculation from Prime Minster Carney – the first major error of his tenure.
Jordan Leichnitz
This weekend, Canada’s airports were the site of a high-stakes showdown when the Liberal government ordered thousands of striking flight attendants back to work barely hours after a strike began. For a Prime Minister whose core brand is bland managerial competence, it’s a rash move that critically misreads the public mood and risks catapulting the country into a new era of labour unrest.
Needless to say, nobody in their right mind is in favour of large-scale travel disruption, but at the moment the majority of the public is on the side of the flight attendants. And for good reason: Air Canada is one of the most profitable corporations in the country. There’s simply no reasonable excuse for demanding that flight attendants accept poverty starting wages and hours upon hours of unpaid labour.
Faced with pressure from the company, tourism sector and other business interests to immediately intervene in the strike, all Carney had to do was wait a few days to let the dispute play out. In doing so, he’d be giving the parties time to resolve the conflict – and cynically, allowing for public opinion to potentially shift if they couldn’t reach an agreement.
A bit of patience would have fit neatly with the no-drama government management mandate Canadians gave Carney this past April. The fact that the Liberals were heavily reliant on labour-inclined NDP voters to win government should have been yet another reason for Carney’s advisors to recommend that he stay the government’s hand and give the parties some time to get back to negotiations.
Instead, the Prime Minister chose to immediately intervene on the side of the company, massively escalating the conflict at what’s likely the moment of peak public sympathy for the workers.
Now, it’s important to acknowledge that unilaterally sending labour disputes to binding arbitration via Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code is a pattern that transcends the recent change in Liberal leadership. In fact, it was Justin Trudeau’s government that innovated the use of Section 107 to quash strikes, using this tactic five times over the last two years on labour disputes at employers ranging from the post office to ports.
Trudeau’s government preferred Section 107 to politically costly back-to-work debates in Parliament that would have clashed with their labour-friendly public face – and they largely got away with it by arguing economic necessity and pointing out the length of those labour disputes. Neither of those cases were made when it comes to the Air Canada strike, and what’s more, the basic unfairness of flight attendants being required to work hours unpaid struck a chord with the public.
But there’s a reason beyond optics that Carney should have avoided using section 107. Here’s the thing: when any government repeatedly breaks the rules of the game in favour of the employer, it takes away any incentive for unions to follow the rules when negotiations go south. When they do it before a strike is even a single day old, it looks like pure punishment for workers asserting their rights.
Flight attendants were out on strike for less than 12 hours – “we’ve been out longer for snowstorms”, quipped one – before being ordered back. With their right to strike removed, CUPE leadership made the undoubtedly difficult decision to defy the back to work order, calling the government’s bluff.
Why would a union take this kind of risk, and the serious penalties that come with it?
Working people are at the brink – they’re being asked to do more work for wages that don’t keep up with the surging cost of living, while watching executives reap ballooning compensation. Those who spend weeks on the picket line have little tolerance for agreements that don’t meet their expectations.
In these circumstances, labour leadership is increasingly under immense pressure from members to deliver significant gains at the bargaining table. The days of membership rolling over or rubber-stamping tentative agreements are over: in Canada recent years have seen an uptick in strikes and more tentative deals being rejected by union members.
In this environment, heavy-handed government intervention in labour disputes weakens unions and undermines their stabilizing role in the economy. Organized labour helps channel conflict into a fair process that balances the interests of employers and workers, but it’s still conflict. In this system, strikes aren’t a breakdown—they’re a legally sanctioned means to force negotiation and equalize the power of workers and employers.
Preserving labour rights for working people, including inconvenient ones like the right to strike, matters not just as an important Canadian value but because it’s infinitely better than the alternative. Workers have to feel that there’s a way for their demands to be advanced fairly within the labour dispute process, or they’re going to go outside it.
A breakdown of trust in unions and labour negotiations is a big risk societally, politically and economically. It leads to exactly what we saw in this case: labour unrest outside the bounds of established rules and a breakdown in trust that the negotiating system is fair – a situation that’s ultimately worse for workers and employers, and infinitely more unpredictable for the Canadian economy.
For the Prime Minister, there are important lessons here. Mistaking decisiveness for the fair, competent management of labour strife is a dangerous poverty of imagination, one that you can imagine more easily creeps into decision-making when his advisors form a closed circle with the business world. This insularity from the realities faced by Canadian workers is a real and ongoing political risk for his government.
Notably, there’s precedent for a political path back from this. Ontario Premier Doug Ford overstepped on labour rights in 2022 when he used the notwithstanding clause to try to quash demands from educational assistants. This gross overreach mobilized the entire labour movement against him – but he backed off, apologized, and come election time enjoyed the support of a number of unions.
Carney would do well to take a page from Ford’s book before the damage is permanent. The union’s successful defiance, the public support for their demands, and the blowback from the labour movement means that Section 107 is effectively dead. Minister Hajdu should take the next step and repeal it, making it harder for the federal government to quickly default to employer-side intervention in the future.
There is still time to salvage the government’s relationship with workers and their unions, but repair depends entirely on the Prime Minister’s choices. In an era defined by the cost of living crisis, labour unrest is not going away. Any government that undermines the integrity of Canada’s labour relations system in a way that’s hostile to workers risks finding itself on the wrong side of history—and of the ballot box.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jordan Leichnitz - Jordan Leichnitz is an Ottawa-based consultant with two decades of experience in progressive political strategy and campaigns at the federal, provincial and municipal level. She spent ten years on Parliament Hill working in senior strategy positions for four Leaders of the New Democratic Party of Canada, including serving as Deputy Chief of Staff, overseeing policy development and handling issues management for the parliamentary caucus. Since 2020, Jordan has served as the Canada Program Manager for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German political foundation. Jordan holds a Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Ottawa, and lives in Ottawa with her partner and two young children.
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