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Whether it’s empty bus stops in Montreal or packages collecting dust in Canada Post depots, strikes in essential services are impossible to ignore. Strikes are designed to project strength, reminding employers and the public that unions hold the authority to disrupt the ordinary flow of life. Yet when such actions recur with persistent regularity, their impact begins to shift. What starts as a demonstration of power can increasingly appear as a sign of weakness. Governments, anxious to restore order, frequently respond with legislation and restrictions that resolve the immediate disruption while leaving deeper conflicts unresolved. This cycle produces a credibility paradox, raising the central question of whether recurring strikes reflect a resilient labour movement or the gradual erosion of organized labour’s legitimacy.
Canada’s Authority in State Intervention
Recent disputes at Canada Post and the Société de Transport de Montréal (STM) illustrate how this paradox unfolds in practice, showing how strikes in essential services follow a familiar cycle. On May 23, 2025, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) launched a national overtime ban, slowing operations while signaling frustration with stalled negotiations. Only four months later, on September 25, CUPW escalated to a full national strike, causing widespread postal delays across the country. The short gap between actions emphasizes both the persistence of postal workers and the risk that frequent disruptions may be perceived less as strength than as a reactionary tactic born of frustration.
Montrealers faced a parallel disruption when STM maintenance workers staged a strike from September 22 to October 5, causing widespread transit delays and disrupting thousands of commuters daily. Like Canada Post, the STM strike underscored how labour action in essential services can quickly strain public patience, the very leverage unions hope to wield. Yet, as history shows, Ottawa and provincial legislatures rarely leave such conflicts unresolved for long. Governments regularly turn to back-to-work laws1 and other restrictions to restore services while sidestepping the root issues. Bryan Evans and Carlo Fanelli contend that neoliberal restructuring has diminished collective labour power by making state intervention a normalized feature of industrialized relations. This ensures that even determined strike action often reveals not just resilience, but the limits of union strength in the face of state authority.
Union Vitality or Declining Legitimacy?
Even under restrictive labour laws and political pressure, strikes remain one of the few mechanisms through which workers can assert agency in a system that is structured in a way that typically tends to privilege stability and managerial authority. Beyond material gains, collective action rebuilds networks of solidarity2, renewing bonds and shared consciousness that sustain the labour movement itself. As Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage note in “Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada”, the persistence of collective struggle preserves the idea that economic life is not simply governed by market imperatives but by social relations open to contestation. Eric Tucker’s works in “Freedom to Strike” similarly emphasize that Canada’s key labour protections were not generous state concessions, but hard-won outcomes of disruptive strike waves that forced governments to implement reform. Recurring strikes thus carry historical continuity by normalizing dissent as part of democratic life, reaffirming labour’s role as a counterforce to concentrated economic and political authority.
Despite these factors, the same visibility that once signified strength increasingly exposes unions to a harsher public gaze. Strikes in essential services now test not just the government’s resolve but also popular patience. When mail service and public transit halt, frustration builds not only toward employers but towards unions themselves. As the cycle of disruption and intervention becomes normalized, the public begins to read labour action less as collective resistance than as institutional deadlock. Ross and Savage observe that neoliberal restructuring has entrenched a political climate where the language of “stability” and “efficiency” overshadows solidarity, casting unions as self-interested actors within a market logic they once opposed.
In this context, state recourse to back-to-work legislation appears less as an abnormal intrusion than as a routine assertion of order. Tucker identifies this shift as a form of “permanent exceptionalism,” in which emergency powers become an enduring feature of Canadian labour governance. The legal framework established under the Wagner model3, which restricts recognition, political, and solidarity strikes, further narrows the boundaries of legitimate protest. Consequently, unions find themselves in a paradoxical position where the very act of striking to defend their rights exposes the fragility of those rights within the legal order.
Strikes in Our Everyday Political Economy
Further building on the discussion of union credibility, Canada’s labour law framework illustrates how the boundaries of legitimate protest are legally defined. As Tucker observes, postwar industrial relations embedded a system that permits collective action only within narrow legal parameters, ensuring that disruption remains controlled rather than transformative. The strike becomes a managed exception, allowed so long as it does not unsettle the economic order. When transit, postal, or education workers withdraw their labour, the resulting disruption exposes how legality, not solidarity alone, shapes the visibility of labour power. These moments blur the distinction between inconvenience and collective dependence, compelling citizens to confront the quiet normalization of coercion in everyday governance. Strikes, therefore, reveal a democracy that upholds the form of freedom while quietly policing its substance, defining resistance less as a right than as a risk to be managed.
Beyond exposing the limits of labour power, strikes point toward a broader reckoning with how democracy itself might be redefined. Canada’s legal framework manages resistance as a spectacle in which it remains visible enough to prove democracy’s tolerance, yet also contained enough to prevent real change. What matters is not only what strikes accomplish, but what they make possible—a reimagining of participation, solidarity, and accountability in public life. Even within constraints, collective action unsettles the subtle hierarchies of austerity, reminding us that governance depends on consent that can still be withdrawn. To move forward is to treat disruption not as a crisis, but as a chance to rebuild the democratic promise around those who make its everyday life possible.
Edited by Catvy Tran
The argument defended in this article is solely that of the author and does not reflect the position of the McGill Journal of Political Science, the Political Science Students’ Association, or the McGill Department of Political Science.
Featured image by James Claffey
- Back-to-work laws are statutes enacted by federal or provincial governments to terminate legal strikes or lockouts, typically in “essential” services. They compel employees to resume work by substituting arbitration for bargaining and are justified under claims of protecting public welfare. For an overview, see Eric Tucker, “Freedom to Strike?”. ↩︎
- Networks of solidarity refer to the relationship of trust, mutual support, and shared purpose that emerge through collective action, allowing workers to see their struggles as interconnected and sustaining the broader cohesion of the labor movement. For an overview, see Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage, “Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada”. ↩︎
- The Wagner model refers to Canada’s adoption of a mid-20th-century industrial relations framework modeled on the U.S. Wager Act (1935). It institutionalized collective bargaining rights but severely limited the rights to strikes by regulating timing, procedures, and permissible forms of industrial actions. For an overview, see Wells Tucker, “Origin of Canada’s Wagner Model of Industrial Relations”. ↩︎
