Air Canada flight attendants walk out
Air Canada flight attendants are now on strike although a lockout has also been declared.
Later Saturday, already a back-to-work order is in effect.
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Kate
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Nicholas 11:21 on 2025-08-16 Permalink
It may be helpful to note, especially as even Air Canada’s site isn’t always clear, that Jazz flight attendants aren’t on strike, so if you’re flying a smaller plane, or can switch to one, your flight might be on.
Nicholas 14:34 on 2025-08-16 Permalink
And the Liberal government, again, breaks a strike and, using a novel section of the law that arguably doesn’t allow them to do so, sends the dispute to binding arbitration. One can debate the harm to the economy and balance priorities, but after doing this again and again, usually after no more than a day or two, no one can really say that the Liberal Party of Canada is pro-Labour.
Ian 15:41 on 2025-08-16 Permalink
They put a neoliberal international banker with no experience in office in charge, it should come as no surprise to anyone that he is acting like a neoliberal international banker.
Kate 17:41 on 2025-08-16 Permalink
Carney’s confident there’s nothing credible to the left of the Liberals, so he’ll just get on with it.
Joey 17:56 on 2025-08-16 Permalink
Mark Carney is giving us the government Erin O’Toole dreamed of. (I contend O’Toole would’ve won a stunning majority if he had been leading the Conservatives this year.)
Ian 12:40 on 2025-08-17 Permalink
In a world of populist governments is seems so quaintly anachronistic to have a neoliberal technocrat at the helm.
Campaign left and govern right has been the liberal MO for a long, long time now – Carney is just being more cunning. He didn’t even campaign left, he campaigned populist. Kind of smart strategically given that it took out the left AND right votes.
Nicholas 13:19 on 2025-08-17 Permalink
Who sent the rail workers, both CN and CP, back to work? Who sent the dockworkers, in Quebec City, Montreal and Vancouver, back to work? Who sent Canada Post workers back to work? And who threatened to do this with the AC pilots and a bunch of others, until they settled before going on strike? It was not Mark Carney or his government, it was “centre-left” Justin Trudeau and his. Harper’s government told the Canadian Industrial Relations Board in 2011 to impose binding arbitration on the AC flight attendants if they concluded that flight attendants rejecting two contracts the union supported and sent to a vote “created conditions that are unfavourable to the settlement”, but it didn’t happen because both sides agreed to arbitration first. Trudeau was the first person to use the law this way, and he directed the CIRB to end the strikes, point final, usually on the day the strike started, with no contract in sight.
The Canadian Bar Association’s National Magazine had an interesting article earlier this year on this specific section of law and the use this way. It is highly novel, is subject to an ongoing court challenge and goes against what both employers and labour thought it should when the law was reviewed in the 90s, with both sides saying it would discourage bargaining in good faith. That is exactly what happened. Carney may have used it yesterday, but Trudeau was the innovator, he’s the one who used it again and again and again, he’s the one that used it at the first sign of disruption, not Carney, not the Harper Conservatives. Justin Trudeau effectively removed the right to strike for large, federally-regulated employees; Carney is just following the road paved by his predecessor.
Anyway, it turns out when you rig the game, the other side doesn’t play: the head of CUPE (not the head of the flight attendants’ locals, the head of the national union) just ripped up the CIRB order at YYZ this afternoon and says they’re not going back to work and are challenging the order. I can’t remember the last time labour flexed its muscle in this country, but it has been a long, long time.
Ian 13:27 on 2025-08-17 Permalink
Trudeau pretended not to be anti-labour but of course he was. He was never centre left, he only campaigned that way. The only thing pushing him centre left was the NDP, and Carney wiped them out.