Recommendations from the federal government’s National Supply Chain Task Force to strengthen the country’s supply chains have drawn a cheer but also one significant jeer from unions in the transport sector.
The task force’s final report, released Oct. 6, offered up 21 recommendations aimed at easing congestion in Canada’s ports, filling labour shortages and improving employee retention, and protecting corridors, border crossings and gateways from disruption.
Among the report’s short-term recommendations, for example, are a call to expand the 30-kilometre rail interswitch distance across Canada — a move meant to give shippers more options to move goods by rail on one company’s track before switching to another for the longer haul.
Read Also
Artificial intelligence put to work on extension
Farm Credit Canada and Results Driven Agriculture Research (RDAR) have unveiled a generative artificial intelligence tool called Root
Among the longer-term recommendations, meanwhile, are a call to “protect corridors, border crossings and gateways from disruptions to ensure unfettered access for commercial transportation modes and continuity of supply chain movement.”
Among the bullet points tucked into that recommendation is a call for Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan to “urgently convene a council of experts to develop a new collaborative labour relations paradigm that would reduce the likelihood of strikes, threat of strikes, or lockouts that risk the operation or fluidity of the national transportation supply chain.”
On that point, the task force says “employers, unions and government must find creative solutions to avoid disrupting the supply chain” as “even the threat of strikes or lockouts negatively affects the operation of the national transportation supply chain and, in turn, Canada’s reputation as a destination of choice for doing business.”
Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said Oct. 6 the government will now move to develop a National Supply Chain Strategy, which “will be informed by the recommendations included in the task force’s final report.”
Among the organizations responding to the task force report’s release, the Teamsters Union said Oct. 6 it’s “pleased” with the recommendations to help fill vacancies in the transport sector.
“However, and just as importantly, the union is alarmed by the report’s language surrounding the right to strike,” the union said.
“Free collective bargaining is not an impediment to supply chain continuity, but this report suggests otherwise,” Teamsters Canada president Francois Laporte said in a release. “Ultimately, unions and everyday working-class Canadian families are not at the source of the world’s current disruptions. Attacking our rights won’t solve the crisis.”
The union said it believes the government’s responsibility is to “create the environment where workers and employers can negotiate freely, without interference, and in good faith.”
“It is wholly unacceptable for the task force to have considered ‘labour disputes’ as events requiring risk-mitigation strategies, on par with climate-related events,” Unifor national president Lana Payne said separately in a letter to Alghabra.
“Limiting worker power by curtailing the rights of workers to strike would contribute to the erosion of job quality, destabilizing the transportation supply chain further — the opposite of what the task force was set up to accomplish.”
Rather, Unifor said, “decades of industry deregulation combined with other anti-labour activities, such as contract flipping and contracting out, have contributed to the recruitment and retention issues plaguing critical parts of the sector.”
“That such a recommendation should surface through a government-appointed task force — in an advanced, pluralist, progressive democratic nation such as Canada — is incredulous,” Payne said in her letter to Alghabra.
“A stable, secure, and skilled workforce must stand atop the list of priorities for anyone looking to solidify supply chains. Sadly, job quality is noticeably absent from the list of action items in the task force’s final report.”
The last major disruptions caused by rail labour disputes in Canada were an eight-day strike by Teamsters-led conductors and yard workers at Canadian National Railway (CN) in 2019, and a three-day labour outage at Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) in March this year involving the company’s Teamsters-led engineers, conductors and train and yard workers.
CN’s signals and communications workers, led by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) System Council 11, also held a 17-day strike this summer but did not actively disrupt CN service during that time.
Among other recommendations to limit supply chain disruptions, the task force report also calls for Canada’s law enforcement agencies and judiciary to be provided with “tools and resources to pre-empt blockades and/or expeditiously remove individuals or objects intending to be used to disrupt nationally critical transportation supply chain infrastructure or operations.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network
