Bill C-39 Committee on Oct. 19th, 2026

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

Can I finish, Mr. Chair? I think it's important.

You're getting information in real time from other departments and from stakeholders. You're getting information from municipalities, from provinces, from territories, from shippers, from Transport Canada, from Public Safety Canada, from Crown-Indigenous Relations and from Indigenous Services.

I can tell you there is a flow of information, but what this does is to say that section 107 cannot be used unless two things are in hand: the special mediator's report, which is public—

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Minister, we've already gone over that. I know that. I don't need to hear that again.

What you're effectively doing is not making any improvement. You're just codifying your thought process. You said you did all of this before, so how is that an improvement?

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

I think it is an improvement, because there's nothing to say that a minister would have to do that.

In fact, I would say that back-to-work legislation has been used with very little pretext in the past, including by the Conservatives.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Back-to-work legislation gets parliamentary scrutiny. An order that you sign gets no scrutiny.

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

I would say that section 107, as requested by many labour groups and Canadians, needed guardrails, and these are the guardrails that we've put into place, including the importance of a national interest assessment.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Okay.

You also talked about how section 107 should never be used pre-emptively. It's wonderful that you've had this moment of clarity, but your government used section 107 pre-emptively with the flight attendants to order them back to work.

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

That's not true.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Would you like to apologize to the flight attendants now, since you've had this new understanding?

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

That's not accurate. The flight attendants were on strike in the most recent iteration.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

No, you issued it that evening.

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

It was after the strike had begun.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Okay, Minister. You're—

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

It's in the public record. We can check the record.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Right. Do you also still believe that flight attendants don't do any unpaid work?

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

In fact, we have a probe under way right now. In phase one of the probe, we did not find evidence of unpaid work. We did find very few cases of underpaid work in the very small airlines. We heard from the unions, who wanted a deeper dive, so we have compelled airlines to provide us with their payroll data. We're about to complete the analysis of that payroll data to do that deeper dive that members asked us to do. This is an important component that Canadians expect—that we get paid for our work—and I agree.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

The proposed new version of section 107 says:

The Minister may take any measure

This is new—“any measure”. The existing section 107 says:

The Minister, where...deems it expedient, may do such things as to the Minister seem likely to maintain or secure industrial peace

You would be giving yourself basically unlimited power with the new section 107, because the new section says that the minister would be able to do anything. Why would you give yourself the power to do anything?

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

In fact, as I've said a number of times, what we've done is restrict the use of section 107 to a very specific time frame, which is once a labour disruption has begun. That's new, and that is, I think, the most important element of the guardrails that we've imposed on section 107.

The use of section 107, by the way, can be asked for by both parties. The minister can contemplate that. Sometimes section 107 is used not just for collective agreements but for other questions of interpretation of a collective agreement—

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

What I'm asking for is the justification for the massive expansion of your power to take any measure—

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

I disagree with that assessment. It is not a massive—

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

You don't—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Seeback—

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

You can take “any measure”, and that's not an expansion. Okay....

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Seeback.

Mr. Kelloway, it's over to you for five minutes.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Sydney—Glace Bay, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Before I get into my question for Minister Hajdu, just to be clear, the charter statement was tabled today, and you can see that if you go to today's Journals.

I want to talk a bit about the.... I'm sorry. There are people talking, so I'm having a hard time. It seems like there's a second committee.

Minister, in Atlantic Canada, where I'm from, communities depend on a relatively small number of major employers and federally regulated industries. When negotiations break down in my neck of the woods, in Atlantic Canada, it's felt immediately in every facet of society.

You've done a really good job of talking about negotiations, about the strengthening of mediation and about helping workers and employers reach agreements before disputes escalate into work stoppages. I'm wondering if you can lean into how that happens.

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

Thank you for outlining the inherent tension that exists across the country when parties are at a boiling point. In many cases, they've been at a boiling point for years. Sometimes parties arrive at the table, and they haven't actually spoken to each other for a number of years, or they've spoken, in some cases, through the Canada Industrial Relations Board or their own mediation service in the form of ongoing and repeated grievances and/or fines for employees. Those really fractured relationships really put a damper, as you can imagine, on negotiating about what comes next.

We are just human beings. We think about unions and employers as these big, monolithic entities, but they're actually individuals sitting at a table. It's members of a negotiating committee sitting with, oftentimes, the CEO or COO of a company, along with other negotiating members from the employer. If those people cannot find a space to connect or talk early enough, especially, then, in fact, it gets more and more difficult—I don't want to say it's impossible—to get to a new collective agreement. This legislation puts into place a motion for those specific parties.

There's one other thing, and I think it's really important that I tell you about this. What we heard from the tripartite committee was, “Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Things are working really well in 95% of the cases. Don't impose a whole bunch of new stuff on us, because we're not the problem, and we don't want new stuff, because we're doing really well.”

This legislation is really designed to be there for those parties that have had the hardest time negotiating a collective agreement, sometimes repeatedly, or those whose collective agreement is so old that the issues are very large and they have a number of things to work through that could potentially slow them down.