Alberta government says B.C. port strike deal ‘long overdue’

The Alberta government said it is “pleased” that British Columbia’s port workers have reached a deal, ending the weeks-long strike.

In a statement on the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada website, president Rob Ashton says the results of the latest ratification vote came in 74.66 per cent in favour of the agreement.

Federal Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan confirmed in a tweet that both the ILWU and the BC Maritime Employers Association have ratified the deal, ending the dispute.

The employers association says in a statement that it ratified the four-year deal, which “includes increases in wages, benefits and training that recognizes the skills and efforts of B.C.’s waterfront workforce,” on Monday.

Alberta’s Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen said the deal was “long overdue” because the strike was impacting businesses across the province.

According to Dreeshen, about $50 million in imports and exports per day flows from Alberta through the ports in B.C. to countries around the world.

“Well, it was long overdue. We’ve been suffering in Western Canada for over a month with this port disruption,” Dreeshen told Global News.

“The province of Alberta and other provinces and businesses have been urging the federal government to step up and treat this West Coast port strike with the same urgency that they did in the Montreal port strike just two years ago.

“It’s been a yo-yo effect back and forth for over a month and it’s something that it could have been avoided had the federal government had the same level of urgency as it did in Quebec two years ago.”

Dreeshen also said the port strike impacted shipping logistics because goods had to be re-routed through the United States and other ports, then trucked to Alberta. Warehouses were also running low on items, such as produce and other perishable items.

“It’s actually going to take weeks and months to feel the effects because we have such a really integrated supply chain, whether it’s from trucks to trains to boats, and it takes a lot of logistics and all have been disrupted over the last month,” he said.

“Everybody’s happy that it’s finally over. But there’s been so many industries that are saying that they’ve had to actually curtail or shut down production. So they’ve actually had to lay off workers or have workers work less hours in a week because they knew that their product wasn’t going to go anywhere.”

Dreeshen added Alberta will be making a submission to O’Regan’s office calling on the minister to be given binding arbitration powers.

O’Regan says that he is directing federal officials to review the entire case to avoid a port disruption of this magnitude from happening in the future.

“So when there are big macroeconomic issues at play, when you have the Canadian economy essentially as collateral damage for these types of union strikes,” Dreeshen said, “the federal government, the Federal Labour Minister, (should) have binding arbitration powers that can save essentially the Canadian economy.”

— with files from The Canadian Press.