How a 987-Day Port Strike Forced Canada to Change Its Labor Laws

On the morning of September 15, 2022, eighty-one longshore workers at the Port of Québec were told they were locked out. Their employer, the stevedoring company QSL, had managers and outside crews on the docks within days, and the cranes and conveyors kept running through the fall as if nothing had happened. Within a month, according to the union that represented them, CUPE Local 2614, there had been accidents involving the people who had been brought in to run heavy equipment they had never handled.

That lockout would run for 987 days. It was still going in the spring of 2025, and it is the reason most people in Ottawa give when they are asked why Parliament finally rewrote a section of the Canada Labour Code that had been criticised for a quarter of a century.

Section 94(2.1) Banned Replacement Workers In Words And Permitted Them In Practice

Since 1999 the Code had contained what looked like a ban. Section 94(2.1) prohibited a federally regulated employer from using replacement workers during a legal strike or lockout, but only where they were being used for the demonstrated purpose of undermining a trade union’s representational capacity rather than the pursuit of legitimate bargaining objectives.

If that clause is read the way an employer’s counsel would have been reading it, the trouble shows up in the second half. The union had to prove intent, and not just any intent but an intent to break the union as opposed to an intent to win the bargaining. An employer who kept the port running with contractors could always say, and was always advised to say, that the aim was economic: to keep customers, to keep ships moving, to hold out for a better deal. That is a legitimate bargaining objective on its face, and so the section was almost never successfully invoked. The Canada Industrial Relations Board could find replacement workers were being used and still be unable to find the purpose the statute demanded.

Québec had banned replacement workers outright in 1977 and British Columbia in 1993. Both provinces had simply prohibited the practice without asking why the employer was doing it. The federal version, drafted as a compromise after the Sims task force review in the 1990s, had kept the question of motive in, and that question of motive was what kept the section from ever being used.

Who Pushed, And Why 2022 Was The Year It Moved

Unions had been asking for the intent test to be taken out since the day it was written, and private members’ bills to do that had been introduced and defeated in the House more than a dozen times. What changed was the arithmetic in the House. After the 2021 election the Liberals were a minority and needed the NDP to stay in office, and in March 2022 the two parties signed a supply and confidence agreement. One of its named conditions was legislation, by the end of 2023, to prohibit replacement workers in federally regulated lockouts and strikes.

Six months after that agreement was signed, the Port of Québec lockout began, and it became the example that got pointed at whenever the bill was debated. On September 19, 2023, longshore workers from the port were on Parliament Hill with Jagmeet Singh at a rally for the bill. On November 9, 2023, the labour minister, Seamus O’Regan, tabled Bill C-58. When it was debated in the House, MPs were pointing at the port, where those workers had by then been kept out for over a year while contractors did their jobs, as proof of what the old section had been allowing.

The bill passed second reading in February 2024, was studied in committee in April, where CUPE testified, and passed third reading on May 28, 2024, unanimously. Royal assent followed on June 20, 2024. The coming-into-force date was set a full year out, June 20, 2025, so the Port of Québec workers went back to work on May 15, 2025 under a settlement rather than under the law they had campaigned for.

What The Code Says Now

The demonstrated-purpose language is gone. As of June 20, 2025, an employer in a federally regulated workplace may not use the services of certain people to perform all or part of the duties of an employee who is on strike or locked out, and the union no longer has to show why the employer is doing it. The categories that are barred include employees hired after notice to bargain was given, managers and employees in confidential labour relations roles who were transferred in, contractors and agency workers, employees of another employer, and members of the bargaining unit itself where the strike or lockout is meant to involve everyone.

There are exceptions, and they are narrow. Outside staff may be used where there is a threat to life, health or safety, a threat of destruction of or serious damage to property or premises, or a threat of serious environmental damage, and even then the employer must first offer the work to the members of the bargaining unit. Contractors who were already doing work before notice was given may continue, but only in the same manner and to the same extent as before.

An employer that breaks the prohibition is committing an offence and can be fined up to $100,000 for each day it continues. Enforcement runs through the Canada Industrial Relations Board, where a union which believes the prohibition is being broken files an unfair labour practice complaint, and the Board has been given the power to order the employer to stop.

The same bill added a second mechanism that gets less attention. Within fifteen days of a notice to bargain, the parties are required to agree on which activities have to be maintained during a strike or lockout to protect health and safety, and if they cannot agree the Board decides. That was put in so that the safety exception could not become the new loophole.

Who It Reaches

The Code covers roughly a million employees in the federally regulated sectors: banks, airlines and airports, rail, ports and shipping, telecommunications, broadcasting, interprovincial trucking and Crown corporations such as Canada Post. About a third of them are unionised. The federal public service is not covered.

For an employer in one of those sectors, the operating assumption during a labour dispute has been reversed. Under the old section the question was whether the union could prove what the employer meant; under the amended one the question is whether the employer falls inside an exception, and the employer has to make that case. An employment lawyer who advises federally regulated companies has been spending the fifteen days after a notice to bargain on the maintenance of activities agreement, because it has become the only door the statute leaves open.

For the people on the other side of the gate, a lockout used to be something an employer could afford for as long as other hands were available to do the work. Since June 20, 2025, in a federally regulated workplace, the employer has been going without the work as well.

References

• Bill C-58, An Act to amend the Canada Labour Code and the Canada Industrial Relations Board Regulations, 2012, summary and status, openparliament.ca.
• Protecting Canadian Labour: Replacement Workers Legislation now in Force, Employment and Social Development Canada, June 20, 2025.
• Liberals table bill to ban replacement workers, fulfilling a key NDP demand, CBC News, November 2023.
• The story behind anti-scab legislation: A hard-fought union victory, CUPE, October 2025.
• Bill C-58, New Measures to Prohibit the Use of Replacement Workers by Federal Businesses, Cain Lamarre.
• Canada’s anti-strike-breaker legislation now in effect, Borden Ladner Gervais, July 2025.
• What is C-58, the government’s new anti-replacement-worker legislation, Radio-Canada International, November 2023.