Railway lockout could have been avoided: Dreeshen

Westwind Weekly News Photo by Al Beeber. RAILWAY LOCKOUT: TCRC members display their picket signs outside the CPKC marshalling yards west of Coalhurst last month before the federal government announced it would be asking the Canadian Industrial Relations Board to end the lockout.

By Al Beeber
Southern Alberta Newspapers

The federal government intervened Aug. 22 to end the lockout by Canada’s two largest rail companies but Alberta’s Transportation and Economic Corridors Minister Devin Dreeshen says Ottawa should have acted sooner.

In a phone interview Dreeshen said the lockouts by CPKC and CN – which he called the first simultaneous ones by the railways in Canada’s history – could have been avoided.

Federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon was to ask the Canadian Industrial Relations Board to end the lockout by ordering a return to work and imposing binding arbitration. The lockouts have impacted about 9,300 railroad employees – conductors, engineers and yard workers.

Teamsters Canada Rail Conference members who gathered outside the CPKC marshalling yards west of Coalhurst on Aug. 22 said they’ve been without a contract since January.

Dreeshen said a stoppage of rail traffic cost the economy $1 billion a day until goods got moving again and the damage to Canada’s reputation could be permanent.

“They could have avoided all of this had they done it in the first place. And it’s exactly what we here in Alberta and across the country so many were asking, urging the federal government to do this and they finally did it. That’s at least the good news,” said Dreeshen.

With harvest starting and products needing to be shipped by train to global markets, this is the worst time for the agriculture industry to have a rail stoppage, Dreeshen said.

“This is unfathomable what would have happened had it lasted any longer,” he said.

“The binding arbitration that the federal government should have done a long time ago is finally in place but it will still take time to get everything back to normal.”

Dreeshen said the reputational damage to Canada has already started.

The CRIB process, he said, could take days.

“We had asked for binding arbitration and the federal government didn’t act and unfortunately, it even took the American government to get involved for the federal government to finally move because about a third of CP and CN’s product actually goes to the U.S. and I know U.S. officials were calling the federal government,” noted the Minister.

Dreeshen said the country doesn’t have proper positive labour relations at the federal level with federally regulated industries, especially in transportation. And “that’s something that needs to change.”

Brandon Fromm of the TCRC said outside the marshalling yards that the dispute with CPKC is about the railroad trying to “change our schedules up a lot and they want to work us longer hours and (have) less rest at home.”

And Fromm says the railroad wants them to have longer trips away from home.

Fromm says trips can be 10 hours in duration with the longest he’s been away from home being 74 hours. Another member says they’re working a minimum of 100 hours a week.

One union member said the railroad wants them to have only 10 hours off at home before another shift.

“In their brains it’s appropriate to have us have time off in hotels and away from hotels in bunkhouses,” said a union member.