Canada Proposes Mediator to Stall Montreal Port Strike for 90 Days

Canada’s Labour Minister is proposing a 90-day suspension of strike or lockout action at the Port of Montreal as union dockworkers refuse to work overtime.

In a Tuesday post on X, Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon said he wants to appoint a special mediator to help nudge forward stalling contract negotiations between the union and employers, which would halt a work stoppage for three months.

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MacKinnon said he was in Montreal to meet with both the Local 275 members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and the Maritime Employers Association (MEA). The union has not worked overtime hours since Thursday morning, and has pledged to do so for an “unlimited period.”

Parties have until 5 p.m. Friday to accept or reject this offer.

The MEA has stated it will examine the proposal, noting that the strikes have impacted its operations. The union has not commented.

Both parties have been bargaining with two mediators assigned to the case by Canada’s Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, but talks have gone nowhere.

The port dockworkers have worked without a new collective bargaining agreement since Dec. 31, 2023. Negotiations for a new deal began three months earlier, which included a 60-day conciliation period followed by the mediation.

The union says the talks are still held up on areas such as how the MEA manages employees’ schedules, with a statement saying that members want a better work-life balance.

In response to the overtime strike, the MEA warned that employees assigned to shifts with incomplete crews will not be paid due to the potential for “imminent slowdowns” or halted operations.

However, a report from the Canadian Press indicated that the union’s spokesperson said “no one has been affected in this way” so far.

Roughly 1,200 of the union dockworkers have taken part in the overtime strike, which followed a previous three-day work stoppage from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2 at the Viau and Maisonneuve terminals.

On Oct. 3, after the first strike concluded, the Port of Montreal said that an overtime strike could result in container processing delays and a possible backlog of containers awaiting handling.

Lars Jensen, CEO of container shipping consultancy Vespucci Maritime, said in a Saturday LinkedIn post that the strike “will slow down productivity in the port and make it more difficult to handle the East Coast backlog in the wake of last week’s strike south of the border in the U.S.”

All of the port’s terminals, including its five container terminals, have remained open since the overtime strike began Oct. 10. When the strike started, The Port of Montreal said in an update that four of its terminals—Cast, Maisonneuve, Racine and Viau—could be affected by the “pressure tactics.”

“According to estimates, the current overtime strike may slow down or disrupt the handling of around 50 percent of goods transiting through the Port of Montreal, both imports and exports,” the port said in a statement. “These goods include food, medical and pharmaceutical products, raw materials for industry, consumer goods for retail, as well as a variety of other goods crucial to the operations of thousands of businesses.”

Thus far, the port’s operations appear to be relatively unchanged in the wake of the strike. According to Kuehne+Nagel’s weekly port operational update released Wednesday, the port’s operational status is “business as usual.”

Sourcing Journal reached out to the Port of Montreal.

According to the port’s online trucking portal as of 4 p.m. Wednesday, three of the terminals—Cast, Racine and Viau—had “light traffic” waiting to enter the ports. Maisonneuve saw “heavy traffic.”

The current overtime strike, and the proposed 90-day suspension, occurred shortly after the East Coast and Gulf Coast ports held their own strike which lasted three days. That work stoppage had its own delay to Jan. 15, 2025, when both the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) reached a tentative agreement on wages.

The largest port in eastern Canada, the Port of Montreal had a container throughput of 120,526 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in September, a 4.8 percent decrease from the 126,555 TEUs in the year-ago month.

In the second week of October, from Oct. 7 to Oct. 13, had its shortest import rail dwell time since the first week of August. Import rail dwell time—the time between offloading the vessel’s cargo at the terminal before loading it onto the rail car—was 4.5 days, down from 6.3 days in the week prior and 7.6 days three weeks prior.