Canada Union Delays Strike Action Among Border Agents — Update

By Paul Vieira

OTTAWA--The union representing Canadian border agents says it's delaying any potential strike action until next Wednesday, temporarily averting a potential disruption to billions of dollars in daily cross-border trade.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada had set a deadline of 4 p.m. ET on Friday for a new deal from Canada's Liberal government, or else it was prepared to begin a work-to-rule campaign.

In an alert sent late Friday afternoon, the union said all strike action by its 9,000 members at the Canada Border Service Agency "is on hold as mediation will continue until Wednesday."

Representatives for Canada's Treasury Board, which handles negotiations with unions, didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. The Treasury Board has said it is willing to reach a deal that respects border-agent demands while being reasonable for taxpayers.

Pay is the biggest divide between Canadian officials and the union, with border agents seeking a pay raise that brings their wages in line with domestic law-enforcement agencies. Canadian negotiators said the union's pay demands were unaffordable, given tepid economy-wide conditions and rising public-debt charges.

Union members, among them front-line border agents, threatened to start work-to-rule conditions Friday afternoon absent a new deal, as they did during a short strike in the summer of 2021. The bulk of border agents are deemed essential workers, and are thereby banned from going on strike per Canadian labor rules.

Under work-to-rule conditions, productivity declines, thereby triggering long delays to process shipments and travelers at Canadian land crossings, airports and shipping ports. Data from Statistics Canada indicate that, at land-border crossings, 26 million vehicles entered Canada in 2023, or about 70,000 a day. One quarter of the vehicular traffic was commercial trucks. During the 2021 strike action, vehicles faced delays of up to four hours at the certain busy land-border crossings.

Business groups and analysts warned of major supply-chain disruptions in the event of a labor disruption. Canadian government data indicate about $2.6 billion of U.S.-Canada trade crosses the border on a daily basis. North American car makers, in February 2022, curtailed production and sent employees home after protesters against Covid-19 restrictions for nearly a week blocked a key bridge connecting Detroit with Windsor, Ontario, the center of Canada's auto industry.

A work-to-rule campaign at Canadian border entries "is going to create problems for the trucking companies and the logistics companies that are moving products around because drivers are only allowed to operate for a certain number of hours," said Fraser Johnson, a supply-chain expert and professor at Western University's Ivey Business School.

Johnson said the auto sector and food retailers would be hit hardest, with factory work potentially curtailed and grocers dealing with shortages of certain staples.

"As we saw during the pandemic, supply-chain networks tend to react badly when there are disruptions. And a border-agents strike would represent a major disruption to the supply chain," Johnson said.

Write to Paul Vieira at paul.vieira@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 07, 2024 16:54 ET (20:54 GMT)

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