Danielle Smith: Air Canada Disruption Bad; Coutts Blockade Not So Much

Perhaps feeling as if she’d enjoyed a little success yelling at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about last month’s national rail lockout, Danielle Smith was back at it this week, demanding on social media that the feds do something to end the possibility of a strike by Air Canada pilots.

Maybe she’s persuaded it was her cries that got federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon to order the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference into binding arbitration with Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railways’ corporate owners, to the bosses’ advantage.

That in turn seems to have been the proximate cause — although not necessarily the fundamental one — for the NDP pulling out of its confidence and supply agreement with the federal Liberals, making Trudeau’s already shaky grasp on power just a little shakier.

Unlikely, but obviously not bad news from Smith’s perspective, whatever the real reasons were.

“The looming Air Canada pilot strike threatens to cripple our economy and there are no signs of progress,” Smith said on X on Monday. “The impact would be immediate. Businesses, tourism and essential travel will take a massive hit. The federal government must take this issue seriously and push for a swift resolution before the impacts become irreversible.”

This prompted former Alberta deputy environment minister Eric Denhoff to ask a reasonable question on the same platform: Are there any businesses in Canada where right-wingers think workers should be allowed to strike?

The short answer is yes. Strikes, in the world view of modern neoliberal parties like Smith’s United Conservatives, should be permitted where they cannot succeed.

For example, when scabs are keeping the plant open and cops and company goons are intimidating the strikers on their picket lines. Strikes in such circumstances can even be encouraged.

But a group of professional pilots who are sticking together and are not that easy to replace? Not so much!

It’s worth heeding the rest of Denhoff’s arguments.

Right now there are alternative airlines, he noted, which was not the case during recent labour disputes at federally regulated work sites like B.C.’s ports and Canada’s railways. Since Denhoff is now vice-chair of BC Ferries Corp., we can assume he knows a thing or two about transportation and labour relations.

So how would an Air Canada pilots’ strike cripple the economy, he wondered?

There would be inconvenience, sure, but inconvenience is not an argument for interfering with the legal collective bargaining process. Indeed, the potential of inconvenience is precisely why our country’s labour relations system works so well at peacefully resolving labour disputes. Plus, of course, the moment of maximum threat of a labour dispute is also the moment when an agreement is most likely to be reached.

Certainly, Denhoff added, no matter how inconvenient, a pilots’ strike at one airline would not have “the impact the convoy blockades had on our economy when they blocked borders, which Smith conveniently forgets to criticize.”

Indeed, Alberta’s premier seems completely to have forgotten that the illegal blockade at the Coutts border crossing in 2022 was costing the Alberta economy something like $220 million a day, or that former United Conservative Party premier Jason Kenney’s municipal affairs minister, Ric McIver, penned a letter to the federal government pleading for help to get the road open again. McIver remains in the same post in Smith’s cabinet.

That is a rather glaring inconsistency on Smith’s part. We can rest assured, though, that the premier will never acknowledge it.

First, in the Bizarro World of Alberta under the UCP, there is no such thing as inconsistency. Two completely contrary “truths” can exist at exactly the same time, as long as they both benefit the government.

In Smith’s public view, obviously, the convoy blockaders — notwithstanding their stated desire to topple the democratically elected federal government in what could fairly be described as a coup, and replace it with themselves — were freedom fighters and no harm could therefore come from their activities, no matter what they had hidden in their trucks.

Indeed, even if she knows in her heart that this is nonsense, it could cost her her job to admit it.

Right now she is being bitterly assailed on social media by the most committed members of the UCP base — the Take Back Alberta cadres who dominate the party’s governing board and other convoy supporters — for not trying to interfere on behalf of the two men sentenced Monday in Lethbridge for criminal activities during the two-week blockade, which was supposedly a protest against cross-border COVID-19 vaccine requirements but was really about the usual litany of MAGA complaints.

One wonders what supporters of the blockade imagined would happen. The sentences handed to Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert after their conviction last month certainly send a message.

Both men were sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison by Court of King’s Bench Justice David Labrenz for possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose and public mischief. Olienick also received a concurrent sentence for possession of two pipe bombs. However, the pair were found not guilty by a jury of conspiring to murder police officers.

They will serve about two years with credit for the time they have already spent in custody.

The Crown is reported to be considering an appeal of the not-guilty conspiracy verdicts.

Smith, obviously, would way rather talk about what she thinks the federal government should be doing.