Canada Post workers during a nationwide strike in downtown Toronto in October. Employment and Social Development Canada removed its historical data on labour negotiations in September.Wa Lone/Reuters
The federal government has removed a key dataset from one of its departmental websites that details the number of strikes across the country, depriving labour experts and unions of key data needed for research and to draft policy.
Employment and Social Development Canada – the ministry that delivers federal programs such as employment insurance, and administers the temporary foreign worker program – collects historical data on labour negotiations, such as the number of work stoppages and wage increases negotiated by various unions.
But in September, the ministry removed the dataset from its website, stating that it was “preparing updates” to the figures. Almost three months later, the dataset has not been republished on the website, meaning groups conducting research are unable to access historical data on strikes across Canada.
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Unions, for example, rely tremendously on public statistics about labour relations, such as work stoppage and wage settlement data, to campaign for policy changes.
“Work stoppage data is important for us, especially as we continually monitor the negative impact of replacement workers on the duration of labour disputes and bargaining outcomes,” said Angelo DiCaro, research director at Unifor. However, “if government is revising how they collect and display this data, that can be a good thing because we need to see more granular and reliable workplace data on strikes and lockouts.”
In a 2021 research paper, Unifor, one of Canada’s largest private-sector unions, used strike and lockout data both from its internal database, ESDC and Statistics Canada to make the case that the use of replacement workers during strikes had the inverse effect of drawing out labour disputes, instead of ending them quickly. Three years later, after much campaigning from Unifor and the NDP, the federal government passed legislation that banned the use of replacement workers during strikes.
In response to queries from The Globe and Mail about the missing dataset, ESDC spokesperson Saskia Rodenburg said it was temporarily taken down after “stakeholders raised concerns” about data on labour disputes for the period of 2022 to 2025. Ms. Rodenburg did not elaborate on those concerns or who those stakeholders are.
The department did not provide a timeline for when the data will be republished, nor did it answer a query about whether data collection had stopped.
The data was previously updated to mid-2024, capturing strike activity across the country over decades. Labour disruptions increased during the pandemic owing to inflation hitting a four-decade high, with unions attempting to recoup losses in real wages. Strike activity peaked in 2023, but over the first five months of 2024 declined to pre-2023 levels. Since then, major strikes have taken place, including two by Canada Post workers in late 2024 and September, 2025, as well as a prominent strikes by Alberta schoolteachers and Air Canada flight attendants.
“This is very much affecting my research,” said Larry Savage, a professor of labour studies at Brock University, who added that he frequently checks ESDC’s website to see if they have put the dataset back up.
Adam King, an assistant professor at University of Manitoba’s labour studies program, said it had been frustrating to be without the data because labour researchers depend on up-to-date work data, particularly in a period of a tense labour relations.
“Compared to other countries, Canada tracks far fewer data points related to labour relations, so lacking what few figures we do normally have only exacerbates this problem,” he said.