More than 55,000 Canada Post workers went on strike for one month in late 2024, after the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Canada Post failed to reach a deal for a new collective agreement after bargaining for over a year.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Unions and employers in Ontario appear to be taking longer to negotiate collective agreements, with both sides often failing to reach a deal in less than a year from when bargaining starts.
New data show that for agreements that were reached in 2024, the average duration of negotiations for both public and private-sector unions in the province was 13.3 months, a sharp increase from 2023, when it took just over seven months on average to negotiate a new collective agreement. Between 2018 and 2022, unions and employers took an average of five to eight months to negotiate a settlement.
Union leaders and labour-policy experts say that over the past few years negotiations have been getting more contentious and are dragging out at the bargaining table, needing frequent involvement of mediators and arbitrators.
“Canada is still dealing with the lingering effects of the pandemic, including a return to normal inflation. That has been complicating a lot of contract negotiations because unions are demanding higher wage increases,” said John-Paul Ferguson, an associate professor of organizational behaviour at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management.
Governments are also intent on maintaining their budgets, leading to public-sector union negotiations becoming particularly fraught, Prof. Ferguson added.
Late last year, more than 55,000 Canada Post workers went on strike for one month, after having failed to reach a deal for a new collective agreement with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). Canada Post, a Crown corporation, had been bargaining with CUPW for over a year. CUPW set a strike deadline of one year from the time negotiations began, and in that 12-month span, both sides made little progress on a whole host of issues, ranging from wages and benefits to the overall structure of the work force. The federal government eventually forced postal workers to return to work, and extended the existing collective agreement to May, 2025, giving both the union and the employer more time to resolve their differences.
In the private sector, one of the longest strikes over the past two years has involved a group of 40 employees at Best Theratonics, a medical-device manufacturer in Ottawa, who have been on strike since May 1, 2024. They were presented with a 0-per-cent wage offer from their employer. They are unionized with Unifor and are working toward reaching a deal after their previous collective agreement expired in May, 2023.
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Lana Payne, national president of Unifor, told The Globe and Mail that negotiations are more contentious because employers know workers are willing to go on strike. “What I’ve seen is that it is hard work getting agreements right now. In normal times, you could just bargain to an end, and get an agreement, and perhaps sometimes there would be a strike. Right now, members are more willing to strike and that is unique. Our bargaining committees really feel the pressure to do well at the bargaining table, and are pushing for more.”
Stephanie Ross, an associate professor of labour studies at McMaster University, said that there is a “catch-up dynamic” related to the high cost of living that is playing out among unions that is making negotiations more intractable and difficult to resolve. “I’d also suggest that [with public-sector unions] the desire to manage government deficits is manifesting itself in hard bargaining on the employer side.”
The Ontario data showed that in 2024, 53 per cent of public-sector unions took more than 12 months to reach a deal. Eighty-three per cent of private-sector unions reached a deal within three months of negotiating.
Overall, however, the data does not paint a complete picture of whether most unions across the country are taking longer to reach deals. Ontario is the only province which collects data on the length taken to negotiate a collective agreement. The federal government only keeps track of the number of strikes, when collective agreements for federal employees expire, and wage settlement figures.
Prof. Ferguson noted that both in the U.S. and Canada, negotiations for first contracts are taking much longer than they used to in previous decades. He attributes that partially to the decline in knowledge of labour relations among the younger generation of workers who move into management positions in unionized workplaces. Unionization rates have also decreased dramatically in both the U.S. and Canada over the past 40 years. “There are a whole generation of people in North America who have entered senior leadership and known nothing about unions, or what their responsibilities are. I’ve seen that drag out negotiations,” he said.
Data from the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) – one of the largest public-sector unions in the country representing federal employees – showed that between 2016 and 2023, no round of bargaining in any of their units took less than a year to conclude. Forty-three per cent of contracts took between two and three years to resolve. The union says that this is because of a federal government requirement that the Public Interest Commission (PIC) process be used in bargaining.
The PIC process involves appointing members to a commission, and issuing a report about details in the final collective agreements before they take effect. PSAC has long argued the process not only slows down negotiations, but can serve as a distraction when both parties are in the final stages of negotiations.
Fred Hahn, president of CUPE Ontario, a public-sector union, said that bargaining timelines have indeed been stretching out over longer periods, especially in workplaces with long-established locals. “Wearing down the union and membership is still part of the employer strategy,” he said.
But unions themselves could be part of the problem, theorizes Charles Smith, a political science professor at the University of Saskatchewan. Over the decades, Prof. Smith says, there has been a sharp decline in strike activity. “An increasing bureaucratization within unions is weakening rank-and-file participation in union affairs,” he said.
“That could lead unions to stay at the table way longer than necessary before using their legal tools to withdraw their labour.”