Canada backs gig worker rights globally while restricting the right to strike at home

Delegates at the 114th annual International Labour Conference in Geneva have adopted Convention No. 193, the first international treaty to establish binding labour standards for workers in the platform economy . The delegate vote was 406 to eight , with 36 abstentions.

The convention is a historic development. Gig platform companies like Uber and TaskRabbit have long undermined labour laws and denied their workers basic protections.

Convention 193 is the first binding international instrument to address this directly, providing minimum standards of protection for all platform workers, whether in the formal or informal economy.

The rights it enshrines will be familiar: freedom of association to form a union, occupational health and safety and access to social security. But there are also articles relevant to the platform economy calling for proper legal classification of workers, data privacy and unfair deactivations from a platform.

The catch is the enforcement gap. While International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions are legally binding on states that ratify them, they are not enforceable the way domestic laws or trade agreements are. Enforcement relies primarily on monitoring, reporting, investigation, publicity and political pressure rather than sanctions.

The Canadian dimension

The Canadian delegation unanimously voted for Convention 193 alongside most countries. The United States and New Zealand voted against , while countries including the United Kingdom and India abstained.

The irony is Canada’s uneven record at the International Labour Organization (ILO). Canada was one of the organization’s founding members in 1919, but it was not until 2017 that Canada ratified Convention 98 on the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining, completing its ratification of all eight ( now 10 ) of the ILO’s fundamental conventions.

That record now looks more complicated still. On May 21, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a landmark advisory opinion ruling that the right to strike is protected under ILO Convention No. 87, the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention.

The ICJ determined that the right to strike is an “implicit corollary” of that freedom. The Canadian Labour Congress made a submission to the ICJ on the situation in Canada and contributed financially to the case.

This ruling, combined with a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 2015 that found the right to strike is covered by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, puts Canada in an awkward position.

Permanent exceptionalism

Coming out of the Second World War, Canada’s system of industrial relations was designed to promote “free and fair collective bargaining.” Yet Canada has has at times received more complaints to the ILO over freedom of association than any other G7 country .

As strikes swelled in the 1970s, federal and provincial governments began invoking back-to-work legislation with growing frequency . Political scientists Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz called this development in Canada ” permanent exceptionalism ” – the practice of characterizing particular labour disputes as emergencies requiring exceptional intervention.

Inflation and deficits gave federal and provincial governments a convenient rationale as to why back-to-work legislation was required and the practice accelerated.

Recent events suggest permanent exceptionalism is still alive and well in Canada. The federal government appears to have found a new trick to interfere with collective bargaining: Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code .

This provision allows the Minister of Labour ( now called the Minister of Jobs and Families ) to refer disputes to the Canada Industrial Relations Board and direct it to take action the minister considers appropriate to help resolve or prevent strikes or lockouts.

Section 107 was used once in 2023, eight times in 2024 and at least once in 2025. The Air Canada flight attendants’ defiance of a Section 107 order in August 2025 raised serious questions about the provision’s legal and practical limits.

A new threat to collective bargaining

The Senate Committee on Transportation and Communications recently released a report calling for a special supply chain tribunal that would determine if strikes involving Canada’s ports and railways could “adversely affect the national interest.”

If the tribunal judged a work stoppage would harm the national interest, it could impose mediation and binding arbitration, with a mediator-arbitrator involved from the start of bargaining. To the labour movement, this is a threat to free and fair collective bargaining.

Unions at ports and railways have been central to the building of national labour movements since the 19th century. If those workers cannot exercise leverage over the flows that are a major part of Canada’s economy, it reduces the ability of all workers to bargain for better wages and working conditions.

There is also the concern of legislative creep: restrictions on port and railway workers could set a precedent that other sectors follow.

Given the Supreme Court’s ruling about the right to strike, this will almost certainly set off another round of legal challenges .

One step forward, two steps back

Canada’s labour movement finds itself in a familiar position – advancing on one front while losing ground on another.

Canada now simultaneously signals that it supports platform worker rights on the global stage, and some provinces have passed progressive platform worker legislation , while the federal government is moving to constrain collective bargaining for port and railway workers.

These contradictory trends are only going to increase the likelihood of union action and economic uncertainty, which is precisely what governments claim they are trying to prevent. Co-operation, rather than confrontation, is the surest way to labour peace and economic prosperity.