MONTREAL — The Ford government’s special law to prevent the strike of support workers in the school environment has echoes as far as Quebec, where the united front of the unions is working to see how it can support these Ontario workers.
“If we’re going to Toronto, we’re going to Toronto,” FTQ president Daniel Boyer said in an interview Friday.
The affected union in Ontario is the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which has a sister union of the same name in Quebec, which has 135,000 members and is affiliated with the FTQ.
And both FTQ and CSN represent support workers, jobs affected in Ontario by this particular law.
“It is the entire Canadian labor movement that will mobilize,” warned Mr. Boyer.
For his part, the first vice-president of the CSN, François Énault, raised the irony of the situation, while governments find it difficult to recruit this type of worker, often “with precarious status and underpaid”.
The Ford government’s special law is drawing anger from the labor community, especially since the Supreme Court of Canada in 2015 made the Saskatchewan decision, which gave constitutional protection to the right to strike.