Sometimes employers in Canada must feel like they are playing a game of Whack-a-Mole with workers. No sooner do they grudgingly settle one dispute than another one pops up and out come the injunctions and back to work orders. 2026 is shaping up to be one of those times.
Across the country workers are walking picket lines or expecting to be, and employers are likely to use every tool in their strike-breaking toolbox to quell our rebellious impulses. All this class war drama will play out against the backdrop of American tariff mania and imperial fantasies about turning Canada into the 51st state. Add to all that background noise the plausible expectations of a crash in the AI-overloaded stock market and rumors of war from Venezuela to Nigeria, Iran to Greenland. The genocide in Gaza and humanitarian crises around the globe threaten more innocent civilian deaths every day.
Over 239 million people are in humanitarian need globally. All this suffering has implications for workers in Canada, and many voices are trying to confuse us about how we end up in this mess, and what we ought to do about it. Far too many of the “solutions” on offer ooze and stink with rancid racism and xenophobia .
Racist, divisive anti-immigrant movements are in power in too many countries and on the rise in others. These toxic ideologues urge us to blame other workers for the crises created by our economic masters. We are in for a rough ride this year, and workers need to be clear eyed about who our real allies are.
Here are some of the disputes and other class war events that are currently ongoing or impending this year. As this column was being written, General Motors announced layoffs effective the end of January that will cost over a thousand workers their jobs in Oshawa.
In BC the union that represents 6,000 ambulance paramedics, whose members have been working without a contract for a year now, announced it will hold a strike vote in early February.
Across Canada, many observers are predicting other strikes and lockouts as well. For example, Air Canada’s 5,000 customer-service agents, represented by Unifor, are currently in bargaining ahead of February 28, when their current contract expires.
Mechanics and workers in Air Canada’s warehouse, finance and administration departments are represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW). Their contract expires on March 31. March should be an intense month at Air Canada. May and June will see other airline industry contracts expire at Sun Wing Airlines and Cargojet.
Transit workers at BC’s Coast Mountain Bus and Ontario’s Grand River Transit will see their contracts expire this spring, creating the possibility of strikes if management proves unyielding. In Regina, the agribusiness giant Vitara will see the current contract for its workforce, represented by the Grain and General Services Union, expire in the Fall, thus setting the stage for work stoppages during the negotiations for a new agreement.
Three big public sector unions are in bargaining with the province’s newly elected Progressive Conservative majority government this year in Newfoundland and Labrador. The Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public and Private Employees has three contracts expiring on March 31 covering workers in healthcare and public administration. Healthcare workers represented by the Association of Allied Health Professionals and the Registered Nurses’ Union will also be in bargaining with the province, with contracts expiring on June 30.
Many of these disputes and the others that will emerge over 2026 run the danger of seeing workers forced back to the job site and/or having an unsatisfactory settlement imposed on them by government. Employer confidence that the government will intervene on their behalf again, as it has so often in the past, is well founded. For example, as noted in a paper issued by Colley West, a Vancouver-based consultant firm in the shipping industry: “ Since 1972 there have been 13 labour disputes, nine of which have resulted in government intervention, including the most recent lockout of Local 514 in 2024.”
Government strike breaking in Canada has a long history, and the squalid details are addressed in an important paper issued by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Jon Milton last year. It focuses on the frequent use of section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to coerce the end of strikes. Milton notes: “Since June 2024, the federal government has used Section 107 eight times to end strikes and lockouts. It prevented a strike among WestJet mechanics, temporarily ended a strike/lockout of Canada Post workers, sent workers at the ports of Montreal and Vancouver back to work, and ended job actions at CN and CP rail. It has become the go-to tool in the federal government’s toolbox to put an end to worker action.
Section 107 is a relatively arcane piece of legislation—one that has been on the books since 1984, but was rarely used until the past decade and a half. It grants the federal labour minister (recently rebranded by the federal government as the “Jobs and Families” minister) the power to unilaterally end strikes or lockouts that are threats to “industrial peace.” The CIRB, once Section 107 is employed, sends both parties to binding arbitration, where a “neutral” arbitrator has the ability to impose a contract on the parties.”
And if Section 7 does not do the trick, employers can always call for back to work legislation. As Milton notes: “Federally, the first piece of back-to-work legislation was passed in 1950 against railroad workers, and the legislation would not be used again until 1958. But beginning in the mid-1960s, back-to-work legislation became a regular feature of Canadian industrial relations—being used an average of four to five times per year from that point on, counting both federal and provincial laws, with a short drop in frequency in the late 1990s.
The peak of this came during the 1982 recession and its aftermath, when 1.5 million Canadian workers were subject to “temporary” and “exceptional” strike restriction measures in the course of just over a year.”
It isn’t called class war for nothing, and it is being waged enthusiastically by Canada’s ruling class this year. We need, as workers and allies of labour, to reject our opponents’ invitations to racism and xenophobia. We should support all strikes, both formally authorized and wild cat. The other side knows it’s a war, and they are preparing their weapons. We would be wise to do the same, renewing our solidarity with each other and our mutual aid during what promises to be a difficult year.
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