Dan Muys

“Mr. Speaker, this is an urgent fight over what kind of country we want to build. As a member of Parliament and as a Canadian, I want to build a stronger, more resilient country. I think that the majority of members of the House right now want that. We want good unionized jobs. We want a country where a family can afford to pay its rent or its mortgage, can afford to buy groceries, can afford to send its kids to school and can access health care services that it needs. That is what we all want. That is the Canada we are trying to build. Canadians are being told that Bill C-39 is about building Canada strong, but let us look at what the government would actually be doing. The bill would make it easier to shut down a legal strike. The bill would put enormous environmental decisions on reckless and dangerous timelines. It would create new ways to pre-approve development without proper consultation or review, and it would concentrate more and more decision-making power in the hands of ministers and cabinet. This would not be building Canada strong. This would be taking power away from workers, from communities, from indigenous peoples and from independent experts, and putting more of it in the hands of Liberal ministers. Canadians are being told that we need to move faster because Donald Trump is threatening Canada, and I agree. Canada needs to move with urgency. We need to diversify our trade. We need to build. We need good union jobs. We need energy security. We need need to stand up to Donald Trump, but we do not stand up to Donald Trump by becoming Donald Trump. The Canadian Labour Congress commissioned a comparative legal analysis of strike intervention powers across the G7, and the finding is extraordinary. With Bill C-39, the Liberal government would give itself broader unilateral government power to end a strike than any other country in the G7. France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and even the United States respect a worker’s right to strike more than the Liberal government does. Even in Donald Trump’s America, the president cannot simply decide that a legal strike is inconvenient, order workers back to work and impose a binding settlement. There are legal thresholds, there is judicial oversight and there are limits on the duration of intervention. The Liberal government wants to give one Canadian minister extraordinary powers to decide that a legal strike is in the national interest, and then have workers ordered back to work. Canada would go further than every other G7 country. Think about that. At a moment when Canadians are looking south at Donald Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions, the government is proposing a labour regime that would give a Canadian minister powers that even the American president does not have. Why would workers trust the government with that power? Let us look at what the government has already done with Air Canada. Who remembers, in 2025, when it took mere hours for the government to order Air Canada flight attendants back to work because they wanted to get paid for the hours they worked? In fact, this government has used section 107 within the Labour Code 10 times, more than any other government. Bill C-39 would make the kind of intervention of section 107 explicit in the Labour Code. If economic disruption is the reason we end a strike, what happens to the right to strike? A strike is supposed to create economic pressure. That is the point. Workers have very little power individually. They have power collectively. They have the power of withholding their labour, and the consequence of that is that this is where their voice comes from. The scales are not equal, but that is the power that workers have, and Bill C-39 would take that power away from workers. What happened with Air Canada was not an isolated incident. The government’s own documents tell us that since 2023, nine of the 10 interventions under section 107 involved ending or temporarily suspending strikes or lockouts or imposing arbitration. With Canada Post, the west coast ports, the port of Montreal, the port of Quebec, CN, Canadian Pacific and of course Air Canada, the government has reached to take away the rights of workers time and time again. When the government says to trust it, that it will use these powers responsibly, my question is very simple: Why? Why should workers trust the government? The government has repeatedly intervened to end legal strikes. One labour expert described what Bill C-39 does as “section 107 on steroids”. That is exactly what the government is doing. The government is not removing the power it has been criticized for using. It is taking that controversial power and writing it more explicitly into law. It is putting a government escape hatch into every difficult bargaining relationship, and it is telling workers they can strike, they can exercise their constitutional rights, they can bargain and they can withhold their labour, as is their right, but if their strike becomes too “effective”, a minister can decide that it is in the national interest to end it. What did workers tell the government during its sham consultation? The government’s own consultation report says that nearly all unions and labour organizations called for section 107 to be repealed or amended. They warned that government intervention removes union leverage. They warned that it encourages employers to hold out for government intervention. One union participant put it bluntly: Frequent use of section 107 can disincentivize employers from coming to the table because they know the government will intervene and bail them out. These are unions that represent millions of workers in this country. I am talking about the Canadian Labour Congress, CUPE, Unifor, USW, ILWU, PSAC and every one of the federations of labour across this country. The government heard that, knew that and then did the opposite of what labour asked for. Canada should not be the G7 country where workers have the weakest protections against government intervention in a legal strike. We should not be competing with Donald Trump to see who can put more power in the hands of one executive. We should be competing with the world to build the strongest democracy, the strongest labour rights and the strongest working class in the world. We should be building a strong Canada with workers, for workers, by workers. I am going to end with a quote from Gil McGowan, the head of the Alberta Federation of Labour: ...you cannot build Canada strong by weakening the right to strike, worker bargaining power, wages and living standards. That’s the opposite of what Canadian citizens, including workers, voted for in the last election when they supported...elbows up to defend Canada.”