MONTREAL — Caroline Senneville, president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions in Quebec, spoke out against a proposed new law, Bill 89, which would give the provincial government the power to force striking workers back to work and impose contracts on them through binding arbitration. This is a “declaration of war” on the unions, she said.
Quebec Labour Minister Jean Boulet, who introduced the bill Feb. 19, said he was inspired by the federal government’s use of similar anti-labor laws to end strikes by 70,000 rail, port and postal workers in the past six months.
“What the minister wants to do is help the employers negotiate lower wages and worse working conditions,” Magali Picard, Quebec Federation of Labour president, said.
The proposed new law would let the Quebec government end any strike that it declares is a threat to “social, economic or environmental security.” Since all strikes pose an economic threat to the bosses, the law could be widely used.
Ottawa used the same justification to impose the hated Emergencies Act to break up a three-week encampment outside the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa by truckers and others protesting job-threatening federal COVID mandates in 2022. Several thousand heavily armed police were sent in to break up the protest.
Encouraged by Ottawa’s success in using the Emergencies Act, the Ontario government adopted Law 28 in November 2022, banning a threatened strike by 55,000 school workers. But the Canadian Union of Public Employees members defied the law, went on strike and made gains. They were supported by the Ontario Federation of Labour, which threatened to organize a province-wide shutdown.
Working people and unions across the country, including the Quebec Federation of Labour, joined in supporting the strikers, and the government was forced to repeal the law.
In 2023 over half a million Quebec nurses, teachers and other public-sector workers formed the Common Front, to fight for wage increases amid soaring prices, for livable working conditions and to reverse the sharp decline in the quality of health care and education caused by government cutbacks. It was the biggest labor battle in Canada in decades.
The Quebec government condemned the strike, claiming that “inflexible” union contracts, not government cutbacks, caused the health care and education crisis. Bill 89 is aimed at undermining the ability of unions to wage such struggles. Boulet claims the new law will prevent unions from “taking the population hostage.”
A key fight on labor’s line of march
“Growing numbers of workers are turning to their unions to fight for wages and working conditions that allow time and energy for raising a family and having a political and social life,” Katy LeRougetel, the Communist League candidate in the upcoming federal elections in the Montreal riding of Dorval-Lachine-LaSalle, told the Militant. “That’s what the government is trying to stop.”
LeRougetel, a member of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union at an industrial bakery, described discussions she has been having with her co-workers. Jean-François Léonard told her that Quebec City wants to give itself the power to “‘negotiate’ contracts by legislating them. This is anti-union and anti-constitutional!”
Canada’s so-called Charter of Rights and Freedoms contains a clause allowing the government to suspend any democratic right it considers necessary, LeRougetel said, so working people can only defend their rights by fighting for them.
“The unions need to break with all bosses’ parties,” she said. “And organize a fight against the rulers’ stepped-up attacks on the right to strike and other democratic freedoms.
“Through such battles, workers can build a party of labor with the goal of taking political power into our own hands.”