A WestJet aircraft in flight.
A WestJet aircraft in flight. Credit: Caribb Credit: Caribb

What happy Canada Day news that the mechanics’ strike at WestJet is over already! The union reached a tentative agreement with their employer on July 1.

That didn’t take long at all to resolve, did it? 

The strike, while supposedly unexpected, almost certainly would have taken longer to resolve had Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her transportation minister gotten their way and persuaded the federal government to declare the strike illegal.

But that’s the thing about strikes, no matter how much the United Conservative Party (UCP) hates it that working people have the right, now enshrined in law, to bargain collectively and effectively. To borrow a phrase from Dr. Johnson, the prospect of an extended strike concentrates the hive mind of a corporate C-suite wonderfully, usually leading swiftly to an agreement everyone can live with.

Of course, it’s quite possible that Smith and Devin Dreeshen are disappointed the strike is over. They and the rest of their UCP cabinet are dedicated to the proposition that anything that provides an opportunity to bash the government of Canada, especially when it is led by a Liberal, is a good thing, no matter how many Canadians are inconvenienced. 

Anyway, with their minds newly concentrated by the strike by the members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, WestJet and the union swiftly reached an acceptable agreement last night. After all, it was in neither party’s interest that the strike continue longer than necessary to reach a deal. 

“The damage to Canadians and our airline is massive, a swift resolution was necessary,” said WestJet President Diederik Pen ungraciously, and I would suggest foolishly, in a statement. He was right about WestJet’s need for a swift resolution, though. “We will see no further labour action coming out of this dispute, as both parties agree to arbitrate the contract in the case of a failed ratification.” (Emphasis added.)

As it should be, then. 

I sincerely hope none of you reading this are stuck somewhere unpleasant this Canada Day – say, Paris, Puerto Vallarta or Parksville, B.C. – while the big brains of WestJet try to straighten out the fallout from the 832 flights they cancelled after the start of the legal strike their negotiating tactics were as responsible for provoking as the union’s.

Me, I’m always glad to be in Canada on Canada Day – it’s great country, we’ve got rights and freedoms, and it’s not broken – no matter what those scruffy looking UCP allies at the sides of Alberta’s highways are shouting at you as you silently whiz past in your electric automobile or less quietly in your giant Ford F-150 pickup. (The choice is yours!)  

One of those freedoms, enshrined in our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is the freedom of association. 

And one of those rights, deemed by the highest court in the land to be part of freedom of association, is the right to engage in a legal strike. 

And the strike by the AMFA was most definitely a legal one – so legal, indeed, it even had a declaration to that effect from the Canada Industrial Relations Board! (See Paragraph 5.) 

The complaint by Smith and Dreeshen in weekend statements published on social media focused on the fact federal Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan’s order for the dispute to be settled by binding arbitration did not include a requirement there be no strike. 

Their argument was that this was, in the premier’s hyperbolic words, “a clear contravention of all norms, practices, and precedent when it comes to good faith labour bargaining.”

This overstates things somewhat, but it was unusual. The UCP’s trained seals in media were soon barking that this was proof of the Trudeau Government’s incompetence. 

However, the minister may well have quite intentionally left a suspension of the right to strike out of the letter to be mindful of the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2015 ruling in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, that “the right to strike is an essential part of a meaningful collective bargaining process in our system of labour relations.”

“The right to strike is not merely derivative of collective bargaining, it is an indispensable componentof that right,” the ruling said. “Where good faith negotiations break down, the ability to engage in the collective withdrawal of services is a necessary component of the process through which workers can continue to participate meaningfully in the pursuit of their collective workplace goals. This crucial role in collective bargaining is why the right to strike is constitutionally protected by s. 2(d)” of the Charter.

Mistake or not in this case, sensitivity to the fundamental rights of Canadians, even when they are inconvenient, is not evidence of malice or incompetence, no matter what Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservatives, or Smith’s United Conservatives, would like you to believe. 

It is also important to note that the employer’s obligation to bargain in good faith did not end when the arbitration was scheduled. In the absence of a ministerial order preventing a strike, the requirement to bargain in good faith continued until an agreement was reached – which is in fact what has now happened. 

As for the premier’s call for Ottawa “to make the expectation clear that work must continue throughout binding arbitration,” that is an opinion she is entitled to express. But since the federal government is responsible for labour matters in fields under federal jurisdiction, such as interprovincial air travel, Ottawa need not pay any attention to her. If this seems ironic in light of her constant claims Ottawa is interfering with provincial jurisdiction, so be it. 

It remains absolutely clear, though, that in the absence of a ministerial order preventing a strike, the union was in a position to strike legally, as is its members’ constitutional right. 

At that point, the company’s Job No. 1 was to get back to the table to try to reach an acceptable agreement instead of issuing inflammatory statements accusing the union of trying to damage the company and demanding that the union “must be held accountable for their reckless actions.”

Well, good luck with that kind of grandstanding. No Canadian court is going to find that exercising a legal right to strike in such circumstances amounts to a reckless action, no matter how much it annoys a company president, as I’m sure WestJet’s lawyers have advised him. 

One assumes that when the order was issued without a suspension of the right to strike that the company’s counsel noticed and advised their clients that the possibility of a strike remained, so given their previous bargaining tactics they really ought not to have been astonished when the mechanics walked off the job. 

As any human who flies regularly in the country understands, WestJet doesn’t need a strike by its mechanics’ union to fail to get you to somewhere you desperately need to be, with or without your luggage. 

That’s what happens when a plucky little airline success story turns into a huge bureaucracy with all the usual logistical and human resources complications and then gets bought out by an “investment management” corporation that doesn’t see planes or their passengers as anything except profit centres.

It’s also what happens when a series of national governments allow a capitalist system to operate with little competition and no state-run alternative, a problem that bedevils more than just the Canadian airline industry. Anyone in this country who uses a cellular phone or subscribes to an Internet service understands this. 

Which is why, of course, after all the wailing and gnashing of teeth by aggrieved air travellers dies down later this week, most of us who don’t particularly enjoy being a passenger of either WestJet or Air Canada are going to go right back to using those airlines. 

After all, we have no choice, and nothing is likely to change, no matter who is in power in Ottawa or Edmonton.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...