Council of Canadians trade campaigner Nik Barry-Shaw says the omnibus bill’s labour and project-approval changes carry real workplace safety costs
Ahead of a nationwide day of action on Thursday November 12, Nik Barry-Shaw, trade and privatization campaigner at the Council of Canadians, says Bill C-39’s changes to federal labour law and environmental assessments carry direct consequences for worker health and safety – not just for the corporate interests the bill is designed to serve.
A coast-to-coast campaign to scrap the bill
More than 60 actions are planned outside federal MPs’ offices across the country this week, part of a coalition spanning labour, environmental and Indigenous organizations. “We're targeting Liberal MPs in places from coast to coast to coast and sending a clear message: scrap Bill C-39,” Barry-Shaw said. “We oppose this fast-track legislation that’s driving forward a corporate agenda that will only benefit the wealthiest Canadians, and we’re calling for them to go back to the drawing board.”
The bill’s labour provisions aren’t entirely one-sided on enforcement: Ottawa plans to hire 100 new federal health and safety officers, a roughly 70 per cent capacity boost on top of the current pool of about 90 officers covering 1.4 million federally regulated employees. But Barry-Shaw argues that expansion doesn’t offset what the bill takes away elsewhere.
Weaker strike powers, weaker safety leverage
The bill’s amendments to Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code would give federal ministers broader authority to end strikes in sectors like rail and aviation. “The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) says that now, with this kind of national interest provision added in there – which is exactly what corporations had been lobbying for, using the same language – it’s so loose that Canada has the worst strikebreaking laws in the G7,” Barry-Shaw said.
He drew a direct line to rail safety. “The Lac-Mégantic disaster was a little over a decade ago, it’s not that far off,” he said, referring to the July 2013 derailment that killed 47 people in the Quebec town. “These are the kind of companies, CN and CP, who are running our railways with the commercial freight that they’re moving, who are going to be benefiting from this. And they were some of the chief lobbyists really pushing the federal government to do this.” The result, he argued: “It’s going to mean workers are negotiating with their employers with one, maybe two hands tied behind their backs.” That tension between speed and safety isn’t new to rail: New Crew Resource Management training rules for railway workers, introduced after Transport Canada found human factors responsible for 86 per cent of non-main-track collision causes in 2022.
Environmental reviews on the clock
Bill C-39 also centralizes environmental assessment authority and allows reviews to be skipped or suspended in designated “national interest” regions. Barry-Shaw cited the Pacific Link pipeline and a related marine terminal expansion as an example where “ecologists are warning that this is going to put in danger the southern resident orca population, which is already very fragile and endangered.” The compressed, one-year approval timeline is also a problem for Indigenous communities, he said: “They are not being given the time, and they’re certainly not being given the resources, to actually meaningfully assess and weigh in on whether they want these developments happening on their land.” Disputes like these aren’t abstract for COS’s readers; the magazine has followed a contentious coal project’s long environmental hearing process in Alberta as a case study in how fraught these reviews can become.
On the corporate influence behind the bill, Barry-Shaw said his own review of Business Council of Canada lobbying documents found “all of these changes that are in Bill C-39 were being put forward and were on the table before the whole thing with Trump started.” His read: “They spotted a golden opportunity, and they’re taking it.”
What happens if Bill C-39 passes
Asked about the most consequential health and safety impact for federally regulated workers in the coming years, Barry-Shaw named rail and aviation specifically: “I think about the railways, which I think is pretty important – that’s an issue for the workers themselves, but also for the communities, especially considering railways are often transporting hazardous material. I think about the airlines as well – another area where those workers’ rights are going to be infringed upon, and health and safety are often issues that they raise.”
The Council of Canadians is not backing amendments, Barry-Shaw said “we didn’t feel that it was salvageable in its current form” and its message to safety leaders is blunt: “We’ve seen some unions, like the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), say that they will defy this legislation, and that’s something the Council of Canadians wholeheartedly supports. I think they might be giving themselves more headaches down the road – and we might see the results of that sooner rather than later.”
