The Canadian government has ordered the country’s two major freight railroads to enter binding arbitration.
Freight trains in Canada were expected to roll again soon after the government forced a into arbitration Thursday, averting potentially dire for businesses and consumers across the country and in the U.S.
Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon announced the decision to order the arbitration between the country’s two major freight railroads — Canadian National and CPKC — and Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, the union representing nearly 10,000 engineers, conductors and dispatchers.
MacKinnon’s announcement came moments after The Associated Press broke the news publicly, citing an official familiar with the situation who was not allowed to speak publicly before the announcement.
Both CN and CPKC have said that once the dispute enters arbitration the trains will be able to move again, but it wasn’t immediately clear how quickly that would happen. MacKinnon said he expects it will be within days.
The railroads locked out their employees after a 12:01 a.m. EDT deadline to resolve the dispute with the union passed without agreements.
Talks resumed later in the day — as workers picketed outside and business groups urged the government to force the arbitration.
MacKinnon said the government wanted to give negotiations every chance to succeed, but ultimately the economic risk was too great to allow the lockouts to continue. He had declined to order arbitration a week ago.
“Canada’s economy cannot wait for an agreement that has been delayed for a very long time and when there is a fundamental disagreement between the parties”, he said.
All of Canada’s freight handled by rail — worth more than $1 billion Canadian (US$730 million) a day and adding up to more than 375 million tons of freight last year — stopped Thursday along with rail shipments crossing the U.S. border. About 30,000 commuters in Canada were also affected because their trains use CPKC’s lines. CPKC and CN’s trains continued operating in the U.S. and Mexico during the lockout.
Many companies in both countries and across all industries rely on railroads to deliver their raw materials and finished products, so they were concerned about a crisis without regular rail service.
