‘Building Canada Strong’ needs sectoral bargaining and standards

Canada’s new Liberal government has decided it’s time to get things done. In early May, the government announced its new policy, “Getting Major Projects Built in Canada.” It does away with multi-year assessments, replacing them with a one-year cap on federal approvals for “major projects like mines, ports, airports, pipelines, nuclear facilities, and transportation infrastructure.” The “build, baby, build” spirit was reinforced by a 30-day consultation window before the new timelines are legislated.

The “Building Canada Strong” theme was also used in April to open another 30-day consultation on potential reforms to the Canada Labour Code. That consultation focused on major labour relations issues affecting workers’ rights: mandatory bargaining timelines, essential services designations, sectoral bargaining and federal intervention, including the use of Section 107, which has been used to order striking workers back on the job. Canadian unions raised an alarm that the rushed process could not possibly do justice to the need for labour law reforms and was instead aimed at restricting collective bargaining and strikes that potentially could slow down or interrupt major project construction or transportation logistics in ports, railways, and airlines.

The pedal-to-the-metal pace of those massive decisions and the snail’s-pace modernization of workers’ rights to align with new economic realities is a study in contrasts that should give pause and prompt reflection on the place of workers in the rush to build things.

In early May, the federal government gazetted regulations implementing new labour law provisions addressing wage discrimination and abuses by temporary help agencies. These provisions, which will come into force in October, introduce “equal treatment” changes to the Labour Code that prohibit federally regulated employers from paying workers differently on the basis of full-time, part-time, or temporary status. If the hourly wage or method of payment differs between a regular worker and a part-time worker, the worker can request a review and have their wages adjusted. The equal treatment provisions also apply to temporary help agencies, which will be required to ensure workers receive treatment equivalent to that of regular employees at the client employer. The new law also prohibits temporary help agencies from charging workers various training or placement fees.

These seem like fairness laws that should be heralded, but there wasn’t even a media release to announce the new rules. That could be because the actual amendments to theLabour Code were passed eight years ago in 2018, but they were never implemented while industry associations lobbied the government over the operational regulations to limit their application and impact. The publication of the regulations in the Canada Gazette finally brought the amendments into force with a whimper.

But before praising the new government for finally implementing equal treatment measures for workers, a closer look reveals that the purported reforms do not add up to much, leaving far more unequal treatment than fairness in place. It was also an ironic juxtaposition to finally bring the 2018 amendments into force while simultaneously launching a 30-day Labour Code consultation that included questions of worker misclassification and wage theft in the federally regulated road transportation sector.

The labour and workforce headlines that most Canadians saw was the funding of workers and unions in the service of the Major Projects agenda. Notably the Team Canada Strong program budgeted $6 billion in red seal trades training over the next five years. The intent is to fast-track more than 80,000 new tradespersons and cut the average apprenticeship training time in half, the PM told the Canadian Building Trades. The government’s Spring Economic Update put it this way: “lumber, steel and capital do not build projects on their own. Skilled workers do. Canada needs them now more than ever.”

It is becoming clear where workers are placed in the Team Canada Strong framework. Labour is treated as “human capital”: workers are inputs to production, future workers are “investments,” and their value is measured by the economic returns they generate and the labour market demand for their work. Worker rights—including the right to strike and the ability to use collective bargaining to defend jobs and shape the corporate decisions that affect them—are largely absent from the narrative.

Regardless of the new equal treatment labour laws, thousands of workers facing pay discrimination remain invisible. According to the impact analysis carried out by the Labour Program of Employment and Social Development Canada, they expect only 375 individuals to request a review of their wages in the first year of the new laws, and just 56 workers would actually have their wages adjusted by about $5,600 each.

This remarkably small number of workers expected to benefit from these new laws begs the question of what is actually being regulated. That is not explained clearly, although one can conjecture that the limited applicability identified in the impact analysis results from the exclusion of contract employers that are not explicitly designated as federal employers, even though they operate in airports, ports, and railways and are more likely to rely on non-standard employment. Similarly, workers in federally regulated sectors employed through temporary help agencies are excluded on the specious claim by the Association of Canadian Employment and Staffing Services (ACSESS), the lobby group for temporary help agencies in Canada, that “none of their member agencies appear to operate in federally regulated sectors.”

Another reason so few workers are expected to benefit from the equal treatment provisions is that they rely exclusively on an individual complaints process for wage discrimination reviews. There are no proactive investigations to identify and correct wage discrimination, nor are there provisions for group claims covering entire categories of workers who may be illegally underpaid.

There should be no illusion that the new equal treatment laws will provide fair treatment for workers in the federal sector. The equal treatment comparisons between full-time, part-time, and temporary workers are limited to a single employer. They do not address low-wage business practices, such as contracting work to low-wage employers or engaging in unfair anti-union labour practices. In fact, in the unlikely event that the new regulations required an employer to make significant changes to its business model, it could—unless constrained by strong collective agreement language—simply contract out the entire category of work, if it has not already done so, thereby eliminating discrimination based on comparisons with the regular workforce. In the human-capital labour framework, such are the laws of the jungle.

On at least a dozen occasions, Prime Minister Carney has stated that the goal of Canada’s national projects agenda and workforce strategies is to create careers, not just jobs. Careers are not defined by an individual relationship with an employer but by an occupational community and industry. They involve skills and training, accreditation, job security, and advancement that presuppose industry qualifications, as well as sector- and industry-based compensation. In a democratic economy, these standards are established through free collective bargaining by workers’ unions, although collective bargaining institutions must keep pace with changing economic conditions and workplaces.

Canada’s collective bargaining system has evolved slowly since its post-war origins, which were based on large industries, large workplaces, and long-term employment. Precarious work, small workplaces, fissured workplaces such as contract employment and franchises, and the gig economy have made collective bargaining less effective and denied millions of workers the right to unionize and bargain collectively.

While the Carney government, like its Liberal predecessor, has repeatedly claimed to support unions and has passed important pro-labour legislation such as Canada’s anti-scab laws, it has not focused on extending the reach of collective bargaining institutions and standards to the majority of working people. Of course, such efforts would face strong opposition from Canada’s business class, which has historically opposed the establishment and expansion of trade union rights. In the case of the equal treatment amendments, business stakeholders opposed every aspect of them despite their extremely limited impact.

Instead, the government is focused on heading off major federal-sector strikes in the airline, rail, and port sectors. The government’s discussion paper on the Labour Code cited US and UK legislation that allows intervention in bargaining to prevent or break strikes. But bargaining timelines, conciliation, essential services designations, or even ministerial strikebreaking through Section 107 of the Labour Code will not prevent strikes.

In each of the recent major federal-sector strikes in Canada, collective bargaining broke down over structural workforce issues: automation in Canada’s ports; crew sizes, hours, and scheduling on railways; and pent-up wage demands and unpaid work following Air Canada’s 10-year agreement. More effective collective bargaining that avoids labour disputes must give unions the ability to resolve structural issues that shape employment security and industry standards—solutions that are often beyond the capacity of a union and a single employer to establish on their own.

Increasingly, governments turn to sector-wide approaches when they genuinely want to address worker issues. Rather than setting standards workplace by workplace, sectoral bargaining and industry-wide standards establish common rules across an entire sector. There was a nod to this approach in the equal treatment regulations, which defined geographic industry zones based on Canada’s 64 EI regions, within which equal treatment comparisons would apply to any federally regulated employer. This geographic approach resembles Québec’s decree system, which extends negotiated standards across eight sectors to establish minimum wages and working conditions within regional labour markets.

Canada’s major projects agenda is tailor-made for this kind of sector-wide approach, including sectoral bargaining and industry-wide standards established through collective bargaining. Much of this is already in place in federal construction, where prevailing wages are based on the relevant union agreements. Negotiated standards should be attached as a condition to the more than $200 billion in direct federal spending on major projects, defence, advanced manufacturing, and housing over the next five years.

There was some recognition of this in the Labour Code consultation, which sought input on sectoral bargaining but gave no indication that the government was serious about pursuing it. To many federal unions, it appeared to be a red herring designed to distract from the more immediate threat of restrictions on the right to strike.

“We have also advocated for sectoral bargaining in appropriate contexts,” Unifor told the government in its submission. “Unifor therefore recognizes that new approaches to unionization are necessary in a changing economy. However, this current Consultation is inadequate to deal with this very broad set of questions.”

It is undoubtedly true that genuine consultation on broader-based bargaining and sectoral standards would give workers and their unions a meaningful role in shaping the world of work in their occupational communities and industries, and that such consultation cannot be conducted out of the blue in 30 days.

But this government insists that Canada can build again and make transformative changes with unprecedented speed and resolve. If workers are more than inputs and investments, Building Canada Strong must include a comprehensive workforce policy, sectoral standards, and sectoral bargaining in every sector covered by the Labour Code.

Fred Wilson writes on labour and social issues. He is retired from Unifor and is the author of A New Kind of Union (Lorimer, 2019). He also volunteers as an advisor to the Mexico Worker Rights Action (CALIS) project. Follow his posts on Bluesky and Medium.