Defend the Right to Strike

October 2026 Policy Statement

Canadians are looking for ways to support our country through economic hardship and threats to our sovereignty. People are buying Canadian, standing with affected workers and industries, and expressing a renewed sense of national solidarity. At the same time, this government is using the crisis as cover to shift power away from everyday Canadians and toward employers and the same corporate interests, on both sides of the border, that benefit from Donald Trump’s attacks on workers, unions and democratic control over the economy.

In our last policy statement, we warned that the trade war could open the door to shock doctrine-style reforms: using the economic crisis, and the fear and overwhelm that come with it, to push through policies that shift more wealth and power upward. Bill C-39 is one of them. The trade war may be temporary; the permanent codification of strike-ending powers would not be.

Workers are not the only ones being asked to give up rights in the name of speed, certainty and the “national interest.” Indigenous leaders are already organizing against parts of Bill C-39 that accelerate major-project approvals, warning about the consequences for Treaty rights, meaningful consultation and the land. Environmental groups are raising many of the same concerns. These fights are connected. Workers defending the right to strike and Indigenous peoples defending their rights and lands are being told that democratic rights become obstacles when they stand in the way of investment and corporate power.

The Supreme Court of Canada recognized the right to strike as an indispensable part of meaningful collective bargaining in 2015. In 2025, we demanded the repeal of section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, and called for the right to strike, as a fundamental right, to be unlimited, unqualified and irrevocable.

Section 107 does not expressly say that the Minister of Labour can end a lawful strike, order workers back to work or impose binding arbitration. Governments have unscrupulously used its broad “industrial peace” language to do those things anyway. Unions are still challenging the scope of that power in court.

Instead of repealing section 107, this government has introduced Bill C-39, which would write those rights-infringing powers directly into the Code. Some parts of the bill are overdue and welcome. First-contract arbitration and stronger successor rights (for workers affected by contract flipping in the airport and air-transportation sector) should have been law already. They are not a price workers should have to pay for keeping the right to strike.

Under Bill C-39, once a strike or lockout is underway, the Minister could direct the Canada Industrial Relations Board to resume operations, extend a collective agreement and impose a binding method of settling the dispute if the Minister decides the work stoppage “adversely affects or may adversely affect the national interest.”

The bill requires a special mediator and a report before that power can be used. But at the end of that process, the decision still rests on a minister’s judgment about what may affect the “national interest.”

No one's rights should be conditional on the speculation and caprice of some government minister. This government does not need a crystal ball to know that proceeding with Bill C-39 as written will adversely affect the interest of working people.

Workers are not a special interest outside the ‘national interest.’ Neither are Indigenous peoples, their Treaty rights, or the land and water all of us depend on. Workers are the people who move goods, deliver mail, fly planes, maintain infrastructure and keep services running. A national-interest test becomes dangerous when it treats uninterrupted profit-making operations as the national interest while treating the workers who make those operations and profits possible as a problem to be managed. A right that disappears when it becomes costly to employers is not much of a right.

Economic pressure is the point of a strike. It is what gives workers bargaining power. If a strike can be ended because it causes economic disruption, workers are punished for using the very leverage that makes a strike work. Employers that expect Ottawa to end a sufficiently disruptive strike have less reason to compromise at the table.

Collective bargaining means very little if the government can take workers’ leverage away as soon as that leverage begins to work.

This is not hypothetical. In 2024 and 2025, Ottawa repeatedly used section 107 in major disputes in rail, ports, postal services and aviation, and employers began relying on their friends in government to do exactly that. 

We celebrated the Air Canada flight attendants who stayed on the picket line after the federal government attempted to end their strike. The lesson of the Air Canada fight is not that every union can simply ignore an order and expect to win; it is that legal rights survive when workers have the organization and solidarity to defend them.

We should fight C-39 in Parliament, support legal challenges, and prepare the labour movement to act together in defiance if the government uses these powers against workers.

The Labour Council resolves to:

1. Reaffirm our 2025 policy calling for the repeal of section 107 of the Canada Labour Code and for a Workers’ Bill of Rights that affirms an unlimited, unqualified and irrevocable right to strike for all workers.

2. Call on the federal government and all Members of Parliament to remove Bill C-39’s proposed strike-ending powers and reject an open-ended “national interest” test as a basis for terminating lawful strikes.

3. Work with the Canadian Labour Congress, affiliates, other labour councils and allies on coordinated legislative, legal, public and international action to defeat these provisions, including supporting an ILO freedom-of-association complaint if the strike restrictions become law.

4. Develop a Labour Council rapid-response and strike-support plan so affiliates targeted by back-to-work measures can quickly access coordinated solidarity, communications, political pressure, legal support and mobilization from across the Council.

5. Stand with affiliates that collectively determine they must resist an unjust or unconstitutional strike-ending order, including by coordinating material, political and public solidarity and opposing fines or retaliation intended to isolate those workers.

6. Reaffirm our commitment to stand with Indigenous land defenders resisting development legislation that runs counter to the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and support Indigenous Nations challenging Bill C-39 and demanding meaningful consultation, respect for their rights and Treaties, and protection of the land and environment.