Canadian union issues 72-hour strike warning to freight railroad hours after it resumes service

TORONTO (AP) — A Canadian workers union issued a 72-hour strike notice to one of Canada’s two major freight railroads Friday, only hours after the company’s trains had begun rolling again following a potentially devastating stoppage.

The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference filed its strike notice against Canadian National shortly after it announced that it plans to challenge a government order that forced it into arbitration with both CN and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. railroads to end a lockout, said union spokesperson Marc-André Gauthier.

Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon announced the decision to force the parties into binding arbitration on Thursday afternoon, about 16 hours after a lockout shut down the railroads, saying the economic risk was too great to allow them to continue. He had declined to order arbitration a week ago, saying he hoped that negotiations between the companies and the union would succeed.

“This is not about disobeying the minister’s order. It’s about exercising our right,” Teamsters Canada President Francois Laporte said Friday in announcing the strike. “We will our exercise our right within the legal framework.”

Canadian National trains had begun rolling at 7 a.m. all across Canada, said CN spokesperson Jonathan Abecassis. The development initially appeared to at least partially avert a work stoppage that threatened to wreak havoc on the economies of Canada and the U.S., where many companies in both countries and across all industries rely on railroads to deliver their raw materials and finished products.

Trains operated by the second company, Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd., had remain parked pending the union’s challenge to the arbitration order.

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.

Billions of dollars of goods move between Canada and the U.S. via rail each month, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska.