December 15, 2024 3:51 pm. Last Updated December 16, 2024 12:39 am.
Operations at Canada Post will resume at 8 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Dec. 17, the company said, after the Canada Industrial Relations Board ordered a return to work.
Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon on Friday directed the Canada Industrial Relations Board to order the 55,000 picketing employees back to work if a deal wasn’t doable before the end of the year.
Following two days of hearings over the weekend, Canada Post said the board determined that negotiations between the Crown corporation and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers are at an impasse.
On order from the minister, the labour board has extended the union contracts through May to allow more time to pass to allow the bargaining process to work its way through.
Canada Post said an agreement in principle with the union for a five-per-cent increase has been signed, starting the day following the day the collective agreements expired.
The union couldn’t be reached to comment on an exact timing of when the staff will return to work.
It said on Friday MacKinnon’s intervention was part of a disturbing pattern in which the government lets employers off the hook for bargaining in good faith with workers and their unions.
Business groups had increasingly called on the government to intervene as companies and individuals scrambled to find alternative modes of delivery with the holiday shopping season in full swing.
Ottawa invoked a section 107 of the Labour Code to issue its directive today, after using the same powers to intervene earlier this year in disputes at the country’s railways and ports, directing the board to order workers back to work and impose binding arbitration.
MacKinnon termed the move a creative solution by not sending the matter directly to binding arbitration – as the government did in the earlier standoffs.
“We’re calling a timeout,” MacKinnon said to reporters in Ottawa on Friday.
“Suffice to say positions appeared to have hardened and it became clear to me we were in a total impasse.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 15, 2024.