Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to speak with you today about the 2023 strike at the Port of Vancouver.
My name is Barry Eidlin, and I am an associate professor of sociology at McGill University, where I have taught since 2015.
My expertise is in the study of labour movements, politics and policy. I have published extensively on the formation and development of Canadian and U.S. labour regimes, trying to understand why two policy regimes that started out so similar evolved along different paths, with Canada protecting labour rights over time while the U.S. allowed them to erode.
So far, the committee has received detailed reports from many witnesses about the devastating impacts that the two-week strike, starting on July 1, had on Canadian businesses large and small. What the committee has heard less of is how we got to July 1, but that's important because we need to understand strikes as part of the collective bargaining process, not just as specific events to deal with on their own.
As you know, negotiations for the port agreement began on February 16. After more than a month, on March 20, the ILWU declared an impasse and asked for a conciliator. There were then 60 days of conciliation, followed by a 21-day cooling-off period. Then there was a strike vote. The ILWU then gave a 72-hour strike notice, and then finally, on July 1, workers went on strike.
What we see is that there are plenty of mechanisms already in place in the collective bargaining process to reduce the likelihood of strikes. That's what conciliation and cooling-off periods are for.
It's also important to recognize that workers, themselves, rarely want to go on strike. They go on strike because they have to, because it's the last resort after all other attempts to get their employers to address their concerns have failed.
The question we need to ask is this: Why, given all these mechanisms already in place, did we see a strike at the B.C. ports? Why did the process break down?
Here, ILWU president Rob Ashton's testimony before this committee earlier can provide some clues. As you recall, Mr. Ashton noted that the BCMEA has shifted its bargaining strategy since 2010. Instead of engaging in meaningful negotiations, it has dragged its feet while waiting for government intervention to impose a settlement in the name of preventing economic catastrophe. The BCMEA is not alone in this. Rather, it is part of what scholars Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz call Canada's regime of “permanent exceptionalism”.
Under that regime, Canadian governments and employers consistently declare their support for collective bargaining rights while repeatedly finding reasons to circumvent those rights “just this once”. As a result, Canadian federal and provincial governments have been some of the heaviest users of back-to-work legislation among G7 countries, and the top violators of international labour rights in that group. Indeed, between 2002 and 2019, Canada accounted for 54% of complaints against G7 countries of violations of labour rights filed with the ILO's committee on freedom of association.
While each individual intervention might seem reasonable, as it might here with the B.C. ports, over time these interventions have a corrosive effect on the collective bargaining process. That's because repeated interventions reduce employers' incentives to bargain since they can just sit and wait for governments to impose settlements, or use the threat of government intervention to get their way. It is not healthy to have a knee-jerk reaction of resorting to government intervention after the fact rather than committing to the process.
If we're serious about maintaining a robust system of collective bargaining, we must have a system that includes strong incentives to reach negotiated agreements, backed by a meaningful right to strike. There is a reason that the Supreme Court described the right to strike as an “indispensable component” of workers' collective bargaining rights. Trying to solve labour disputes through ad hoc government intervention may solve the short-term problem, but it creates bigger problems down the road.
Thank you for your time.