Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks in Las Vegas, on Dec. 5, 2019.Isaac Brekken/The Associated Press
Amazon and the federal government are at odds over whether a proposed meeting between Industry Minister François-Phillippe Champagne and CEO Andy Jassy will take place in the near future.
Mr. Champagne had invited Mr. Jassy to meet with him last week after an abrupt decision by the tech giant to shutter operations in Quebec, leaving close to 2,000 people without jobs. In a public letter to the CEO, Mr. Champagne said it was not too late for Amazon to reverse its decision, while also calling for a review of the federal government’s “business relationship” with the company.
Audrey Milette, a spokesperson at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday evening that Mr. Jassy declined the invitation to meet with Mr. Champagne, “doing so through the media.”
Ms. Milette explained that the minister’s office indirectly found out about the refusal through an e-mail thread between a journalist and Amazon. “The minister is currently in discussions with colleagues to determine the next steps,” she said.
But Amazon has denied that Mr. Jassy refused to meet with Mr. Champagne.
Steve Kelly, a company spokesperson, said that Mr. Jassy had not responded to Mr. Champagne’s request, and that a team from the company was available to brief the minister again about the decision to shut down all seven of its facilities in Quebec. Amazon corporate staff had first briefed Mr. Champagne’s office on the day the closings were announced.
The tech giant said last week that it would be laying off 1,700 full-time employees and 250 temporary workers after evaluating that operations in Quebec were no longer needed. The company has denied that the warehouse closings were related to the unionization of more than 200 employees last May at one of its facilities in Laval, Que. That facility became the first Amazon warehouse to successfully unionize in Canada, and the union representing those workers had made significant inroads into unionizing other Amazon warehouses in the province.
The Quebec and federal governments were swift to condemn the decision. Mr. Champagne told CTV’s Question Period last weekend that Amazon was “not fully transparent” on a phone call last week about the extent of job losses.
Before the announcement, Amazon has more than 45,000 employees in Canada, many of them working at fulfillment centres in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec.
Ms. Milette reiterated that the government still plans to call for a review of its business relationship with Amazon.
Ottawa has spent approximately $116-million on contracts with Amazon, public filings show. Since 2020, the federal government has entered into agreements mostly with the company’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, to provide IT-related services to various federal departments. The federal immigration department and Canada Border Services Agency are the biggest users of Amazon’s cloud-computing services, spending $26-million and $24-million, respectively, since 2020.
In terms of dollar value, the government’s reliance on Amazon has grown over the past five years. In 2020, for example, the government had $2-million worth of contracts with Amazon, and by 2023, that number had grown to $44-million. In 2024, the government spent almost $39-million on engaging Amazon’s services.
Amazon Web Services is one of eight cloud service providers to the federal government, an agreement that was established with tech companies in 2019 to offer secure cloud services to federal and provincial government departments.
The public database shows that Ottawa has spent more on contracts with Microsoft, compared to Amazon, over the past five years. Since 2020, the federal government has signed more than $250-million worth of contracts with Microsoft.
But these numbers pale in comparison to Amazon’s overall revenue from all lines of its business. In 2023, Amazon generated US$575-billion in revenue. In its most recent quarter ending Oct. 31, 2024, Amazon Web Services brought in nearly $28-billion in sales to the company.
Mr. Champagne’s gesture in inviting Mr. Jassy to meet and threatening to review government contracts is largely symbolic, said Barry Eidlin, a sociologist studying wealth inequality at McGill University.
“They are a $2-trillion-dollar global multinational and they have the leverage to retain control of how they want their business to operate. Just as they shut down their operations in Quebec, it is not outside the realm of possibility that they could pull out of Canada altogether,” Dr. Eidlin said.
Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work in Vancouver and formerly an economist with Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, said that governments have a responsibility to regulate business in a way that is much broader than using contracts to try to “bribe businesses to behave better.”
Since the pandemic, Amazon has spent considerable legal and public-relations resources battling numerous attempts at unionizing in warehouses across the United States, Europe and Canada.
Dr. Eidlin says that government leverage is ultimately limited but collective organizing by workers could conceivably help force Amazon into better business and labour practices.
“There is a tipping point in which their ability to deliver packages depends on workers. It is not an easy solution, but it is the only one which is plausible.”