While the full details of what happened will be examined by investigators like the National Transportation Safety Board and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, one thing is already clear, safety in aviation does not exist in a vacuum. It depends on people highly trained, highly focused professionals working under conditions that allow them to do their jobs without distraction, fatigue, or fear.

And right now, those conditions are being undermined.

In the United States, political dysfunction has once again led to a government shutdown. As a result, essential workers including air traffic controllers are required to continue working without pay until politicians resolve their impasse. They will eventually receive back pay, but that does nothing to ease the immediate strain, mortgages don’t pause, groceries don’t get cheaper, and stress doesn’t wait.

When you put people in safety critical roles under that kind of pressure, you are introducing risk into a system that depends on precision and focus.

Fatigue is not theoretical. It is one of the most studied and documented hazards in aviation. When staffing levels drop due to callouts, when workers are stretched thinner, when financial stress compounds already demanding schedules, the margin for error narrows. And in aviation, margins matter.

A lot.

And we cannot forget another victim in moments like this, the workers themselves.

The controllers in those towers carry an immense responsibility every second they are on position. And in particular, the controller responsible for that runway will carry the weight of this tragedy for the rest of their life. These are professionals who train for years to keep people safe and when the system fails around them, they are often left to bear the human cost.

No one should have to live with that because a political system couldn’t get its act together.

We will likely see political leaders in Washington point fingers, Republicans blaming Democrats, Democrats blaming Republicans. And the truth is, both sides bear responsibility for a system that allows essential safety workers to be caught in the middle of political brinkmanship.

Because this isn’t about ideology. It’s about responsibility.

Air traffic control towers are not the place for political games. They are the backbone of a system that millions of people trust with their lives every single day, including Canadians travelling to and from the United States.

If governments are going to designate workers as “essential,” then they must also guarantee the conditions necessary for those workers to perform safely. That includes stable pay, adequate staffing, and protections against fatigue and burnout especially during periods of political instability.

Anything less is a failure of leadership.

This moment demands more than sympathy. It demands action.

We need clear policies that ensure safety-critical workers are never placed in situations where financial stress or staffing shortages compromise their ability to do their jobs. We need governments that understand that public safety cannot be turned on and off depending on whether a budget has passed.

And we need to remember that behind every policy failure are real people, workers trying to do their jobs, and families who trust that the system will bring their loved ones home safely.

Two Canadian families are now living with the consequences of that system falling short.

We owe it to them and to everyone who steps onto a plane to make sure it never happens again.

Now we have another piece of the puzzle, and it should make everyone who cares about airport safety sit up straight.

In June 2023, Canada was audited by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) under its Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme (USOAP). Transport Canada’s own briefing materials say the audit produced an Effective Implementation score of 65.1%, a steep drop from 95% in 2005. The same material is careful to point out what airlines quickly emphasized in their media responses: this is an audit of the state’s oversight system, not a direct judgement that every Canadian flight is suddenly unsafe.

Fine. But let’s not turn that clarification into an excuse to stop thinking.

Because “oversight” is not a box you check for fun. Oversight is the system that turns written rules into lived reality. Oversight is what decides whether standards are enforced consistently, whether risks are identified early, whether training and fatigue programs are scrutinized properly, whether deficiencies become corrective actions instead of press releases. Oversight is where you notice weak points before the public notices consequences.

If Canada’s oversight score is in the mid-60s, the question is not whether airlines can point to internal safety management systems and third-party audits. The question is why the national safety oversight apparatus is performing at a level that Transport Canada itself concedes needs corrective action plans, and why that decline happened on our watch.

And the question after that is even more blunt: what does “declining oversight capability” look like on the ground at airports, especially in the parts of the system that get stretched first when resources are thin?

That is where ARFF lives.

The most severe events are low-frequency but high-consequence. You can go years without needing ARFF at full capacity, right up until the day you need it all at once, and nothing else will substitute.

We have already seen what “thin” looks like

Canada does not need to imagine this as a hypothetical. We’ve lived it.

On January 18, 2022, St. John’s International Airport announced it did not have adequate fire hall staffing to continue normal commercial operations, and the Minister of Transport publicly acknowledged passenger flights would face interruptions and cancellations until staffing was addressed. That was not a minor inconvenience. It was a bright flare fired into the night sky: if you cannot staff your fire hall, you cannot maintain your operational level, and the system starts to break in public.

Then, in October 2025, Wabush Airport became the latest reminder of how fast this can get real. Multiple reports described major disruption because firefighting and crash rescue resources were not available, with aircraft carrying 20 or more passengers unable to operate. You can argue about which regulation and designation triggered which requirement. Regular people do not care. What they experienced was flights grounded, medical travel thrown into chaos, and a community once again learning what it means when safety services are treated like optional infrastructure

If you read those incidents as isolated, you miss the point. They are symptoms. They are what happens when critical safety functions are treated as elastic, and staffing becomes a variable you can stretch.

The “cargo hold” incident belongs in this conversation too

And sometimes the cracks show up in ways that are so surreal people laugh at first, right up until they realize how close it came to being a tragedy.

In mid-December 2025, aviation outlets reported that passengers on an Air Canada Rouge flight from Toronto to Moncton heard banging and screams coming from the cargo hold while the aircraft was taxiing. The plane returned to the gate, and a baggage handler was found trapped inside the cargo compartment. Reports describe a pilot telling passengers it was the first time in his career he had encountered something like it, and that the employee was safely removed.

Air Canada has not, at least in the reporting I have seen, released a detailed public account of how it happened.

Now, let’s be precise: that is not an ARFF deployment story in the narrow sense. This is ground handling and ramp safety, a procedural breakdown that should never get past the basic checks that keep workers from being sealed inside an aircraft. But it absolutely is an airport safety story, and it fits this article for one reason: it is what “thin margins” look like.

When the system is under pressure, when turnarounds are rushed, when staffing is tight, when fatigue creeps in, when training time is squeezed, “impossible” incidents start happening. Not because people suddenly stop caring, but because the system quietly becomes less resilient and less forgiving.

If that aircraft had taken off, everyone would have been asking how something so basic could fail. The only reason we are not asking it in the past tense is because passengers heard something and someone acted before it left the ground.

That is not a comforting lesson. It is a warning.

“It’s oversight, not operations” is not a comfort blanket

You will hear the same line again and again: the ICAO audit is about Transport Canada’s oversight, not airline safety. Transport Canada itself makes that point, and airlines have leaned on it.

Technically true. Practically incomplete.

If your oversight system is weak, you are not guaranteeing safety, you are hoping for it. You are relying on the best actors to keep doing the right thing, and on luck to cover what the system fails to catch.

An effective oversight regime is what ensures standards are not optional. It is what ensures that staffing, training, fatigue management, maintenance practices, and operational requirements are not things we discuss only after disruptions make headlines.

Transport Canada’s own public-facing material about the audit acknowledges “gaps related to oversight processes and regulatory framework,” and says corrective action plans are being implemented. That is the polite version. The blunt version is that the oversight system did not perform to the standard Canada should expect.

And this is where I keep coming back to ARFF. ARFF is where safety becomes physical and immediate. ARFF is not a policy document. It is trained people, on site, with specialized equipment, ready to make survivable outcomes possible in the minutes that matter.

You cannot “innovate” your way around missing firefighters. You cannot “risk manage” your way out of an empty fire hall. You cannot “culture” your way to a rescue.

Plans are not capacity

Transport Canada’s Departmental Results Report is explicit that the ICAO audit assessed Canada’s effective implementation of the eight critical elements of a safety oversight system, and that changes to the audit methodology included hundreds of protocol questions. It also says corrective actions are being implemented, and that ICAO’s validation work is meant to assess whether deficiencies have been resolved.

Again, fine. But here’s the problem: Canada loves plans. We love frameworks. We love the language of progress.

Capacity is not a plan.

A plan does not staff a fire hall.
A plan does not recruit and retain responders in hard-to-staff regions.
A plan does not create redundancy so a sick call does not become a service-level crisis.
A plan does not give workers breathing room so fatigue is not baked into the schedule.

A plan is paperwork. Capacity is people and funding.

If Canada wants to climb out of an oversight hole, it cannot do it with PowerPoints and internal working groups alone. It has to put real resources behind both the regulator and the front-line services that keep airports safe.

ARFF is where the margins become visible

In aviation, the public often thinks about safety in terms of aircraft and pilots. That is understandable. It is also incomplete.

Airport safety is a system. ARFF is one of the few parts of that system that ordinary people can understand instantly, because the logic is plain: if something goes wrong, you need skilled responders on scene immediately. Minutes matter. Tasks multiply. You need enough people to do suppression, maintain survivable egress routes, and support rescue simultaneously.

Mutual aid is valuable, but you cannot build an aviation safety system on “hopefully we can surge.” You cannot plan your worst day around the assumption that someone else will arrive fast enough, with the right equipment, trained to airport standards, ready to operate on the airfield, and available at that exact moment.

So when ARFF staffing drops, the system does not just get less comfortable. It becomes less resilient.

St. John’s showed what happens when staffing absences push an airport into limited operations and cancellations. Wabush showed how quickly firefighting and crash rescue capacity can become a limiting factor for which aircraft can even serve a community. And the Toronto to Moncton cargo-hold incident showed what it looks like when ground safety procedures fail in a way that should be unthinkable in a healthy system.

These are not three separate conversations. They are one conversation: what happens when safety-critical work is expected to run lean, indefinitely.

Transparency and accountability are missing

One reason this keeps happening is that we do not have routine transparency that matches the stakes.

We should not need a crisis, a viral video, or an international audit score to understand where the system is strained. We should have standardized reporting that tells the public how often airports operate at reduced ARFF levels, how long those periods last, and why. We should have a clear national picture of staffing, vacancy rates, training pipelines, retention challenges, and the operational consequences when coverage drops.

If safety depends on margins, transparency is not a luxury. It is accountability.

What a serious response would look like

If Canada wants to treat airport safety like something more than a press line, a serious response has to start with basics.

Stabilize ARFF capacity. That means treating ARFF as safety infrastructure, not discretionary overhead. It means building redundancy so the service does not crumble under predictable pressures.

Rebuild oversight capability. ICAO audited Canada’s oversight system and the score speaks for itself. Rebuilding oversight means more trained inspectors, stronger surveillance and follow-up, and the ability to enforce standards consistently, not selectively.

Make fatigue and training non-negotiable. Safety-critical work cannot be sustained on chronic overtime and goodwill. When the system runs on fatigue, the system becomes less reliable.

Publish meaningful operational transparency. If communities are going to depend on airports for medical travel, business, and basic connectivity, they deserve clear information about the reliability of the safety services that enable that connectivity.

Stop pretending “safety culture” replaces staffing. Culture matters. It does not drive a truck. It does not pull a line. It does not force entry. People do.

The bottom line

Canada can argue about what an ICAO oversight score does and does not mean. The nuance is real. It is not a direct airline safety audit.

But the score is still a warning. It is a measure of whether the country’s oversight machinery is functioning at a level Canadians should expect. When you pair that warning with real-world disruptions tied to firefighting and crash rescue capacity, and with procedural breakdowns that put workers at risk on the ramp, it starts to look less like a technical debate and more like a pattern.

Aviation safety is not something you can run lean forever without consequences. The bill always comes due. Sometimes it comes due as cancellations and disruptions. Sometimes it comes due as near misses and close calls that never make the news.

And sometimes it comes due on the worst day.

If Canada wants to avoid that day, we need to stop treating ARFF and airport safety as places where we can “do more with less.” We’ve already seen what “less” looks like. Now we have international evidence that the oversight system itself needs rebuilding. The only responsible move is to fund safety like we mean it.

If there’s one lesson 2025 drilled into us, it’s this: progress is never “banked.” Every gain we’ve ever won exists because workers organized, pushed, and forced the employer to respect our rights. The minute we let our guard down, the employer comes back for the same things it always comes back for: flexibility for them, instability for us. “Modernization” that means fewer protections. “Efficiency” that means fewer jobs. “Collaboration” that somehow always looks like workers paying the bill.

And in 2025, we saw it in real time.

The employer didn’t just push. It acted first and explained later

Bargaining is supposed to mean something. Collective agreements are supposed to be binding. Workforce adjustment processes are supposed to include consultation and clear steps, not surprise announcements and rushed timelines.

But 2025 was full of moments where it felt like the employer either ignored the agreement, reinterpreted it until it fit their preferred outcome, or simply moved ahead and dared workers and unions to catch up. That’s not a partnership. That’s a power play.

When workers feel like “the rules only apply to us,” morale collapses. Trust collapses. And when trust collapses, service suffers, because public services are delivered by people, not mission statements.

So let’s talk about what 2025 actually looked like from a labour point of view, what we managed to win, and why 2026 is shaping up to be another year where we will need discipline, unity, and a willingness to fight.

2025: A year of frustration, but also a year of proof

The Canada Life mess showed what happens when workers are treated like an afterthought
When the Public Service Health Care Plan administration moved to Canada Life, workers across the country dealt with delayed claims, confusion, and real financial stress. When your benefits system fails, it’s not an inconvenience. It is rent money. It is medication. It is people deciding whether to pay the dentist or pay the power bill.

PSAC pursued grievances over those problems, and one important development late in 2025 was a decision allowing PSAC’s grievances about the transition to move forward at the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board.

That matters, not because it fixes everything overnight, but because it reinforces a principle the employer loves to forget: you don’t get to break systems that workers rely on, shrug, and move on. There has to be accountability.

Workforce Adjustment: the employer’s “restraint” habit, and the human cost
Workforce Adjustment is one of those phrases that sounds clean in a briefing note and brutal in real life. In 2025, PSAC filed a policy grievance connected to layoffs and WFA at IRCC, arguing that the employer should suspend WFA until required information and processes are respected.

And at Transport Canada, PSAC filed policy grievances over what it described as failures to follow WFA provisions, including failures tied to notification and consultation obligations in the collective agreement framework.

Here’s why this is so important going into 2026: WFA is not just about headcount. It’s about whether the employer follows a negotiated process that exists specifically to prevent arbitrary decisions, protect workers from being blindsided, and ensure the union can represent members properly.

When the employer cuts corners on WFA, it’s not “administrative.” It’s a direct attack on fairness and on the union’s ability to do its job.

Return-to-office became a political project, not an operational one
By September 9, 2024, the Treasury Board direction required most core public administration employees to be on-site at least three days per week, with executives at four. That policy was still a major point of tension through 2025, and the employer’s approach often felt like it was driven by optics rather than evidence.

Then, in late 2025, rumours escalated about further increases. Prime Minister Mark Carney publicly signalled that changes were coming and that the government would discuss “appropriate levels” of in-office work with unions, with different expectations depending on roles and seniority

Let’s be honest about what’s happening here. There’s pressure, especially in the National Capital Region, to re-fill downtown towers and revive foot traffic. Ottawa’s mayor, Mark Sutcliffe, has been explicit about wanting downtown to “thrive,” and this question keeps getting framed like the economy depends on public servants buying lunch downtown. Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford has also echoed calls along these lines in public commentary about getting people back in offices to boost local economies.

But here’s the part that drives me up the wall: even the government’s own long-term planning recognizes that hybrid work and modern space planning can reduce office space and operating costs. Public Services and Procurement Canada has a 10-year plan to reduce its office portfolio by 50%, and it has publicly stated current projections of about a 33% reduction based on updated assessments.

In a published Question Period note, PSPC projected operations and maintenance savings of about $2.45 billion over 10 years, plus roughly $514 million in annual recurring savings from office portfolio reductions. And the Auditor General has reported that the department estimated savings of about $3.9 billion over 10 years from reducing the federal office portfolio.

So when we talk about “lost opportunity,” we’re not guessing. There are real dollars on the table. The question is whether the government wants to take the harder path, the path that builds a smarter public service footprint over time, or the easier path, the path that produces quick political headlines.

And that brings me to the part nobody wants to say out loud.

Downtown Ottawa is not just an “office attendance” problem

I’ve been to downtown Ottawa. I’m not going to pretend it’s all doom and gloom, but I also won’t pretend the problems aren’t visible. You can see homelessness. You can see people struggling. You can feel the strain in public spaces.

If politicians are serious about the health of downtown, the answer isn’t forcing a federal worker from Moncton, Wabush, Flin Flon, Toronto, Vancouver, or anywhere else to commute more often so they can buy a sandwich near a government tower. The answer is housing, services, mental health supports, and real investment. The answer is long-term planning.

And the bitter irony is that smart real property decisions could actually help unlock that long-term planning, including freeing up space and reducing costs, if governments are willing to do the work and stick with it.

But long-term planning is hard in politics. It doesn’t fit neatly into a single mandate. It requires patience. It requires coordination across departments and jurisdictions. It requires investing now for benefits that compound later.

A four-year election cycle doesn’t reward that.

So instead, we get the quick fix mentality: “Fill the towers.” “Boost the cafes.” “Prove we’re tough on the public service.” And workers are expected to absorb the cost.

Wins in 2025: yes, there were some, and we should name them

It’s easy to get swallowed by the frustration, but we should also be clear-eyed about what the labour movement did achieve.

Anti-scab protections became real in federal labour relations
Bill C-58 received Royal Assent in 2024, and the federal government set it to come into force on June 20, 2025, prohibiting the use of replacement workers in federally regulated workplaces during strikes and lockouts, with a new framework around maintenance of activities.

That is not a symbolic win. It is a structural shift that strengthens the right to strike where it applies.

Social programs that labour pushed for kept moving
The Canadian Dental Care Plan is real and continuing to roll out. Pharmacare legislation also passed, with the Pharmacare Act receiving Royal Assent on October 10, 2024. Implementation is still contested terrain, but the point remains: pressure works. When labour and allies push hard enough, governments do move.

Unions kept filing, organizing, and forcing the employer to answer
Policy grievances are not a “win” by themselves, but they are a refusal to accept quietly what should not be accepted. The Canada Life grievance moving forward is a reminder that persistence matters.

2026: what’s coming, and what we need to do about it

We’re dealing with a federal government that came out of the 2025 election without a formal majority, and Parliament has been volatile since. In that environment, governments obsess over positioning, polling, and wedge issues.

Public servants are an easy target. You’re a big workforce. You’re misunderstood by large parts of the media ecosystem. You’re constantly reduced to stereotypes. And when governments want to prove they’re “serious” about spending cuts, they love to start by squeezing the people who deliver the services.

Carney has already framed the public service as having grown to an “unsustainable size,” and he has been signalling changes tied to spending and in-office work expectations. That should tell us everything we need to know about 2026.

Here are the major pressure points I see ahead:

1. More WFA, more restructuring, and more “do more with less.”
2. A renewed push for more in-office days, with workers paying the costs in time, money, and family strain.
3. Bargaining pressures to water down protections, either directly at the table or indirectly through employer practice.
4. A political climate that treats public service spending like a headline problem instead of a service delivery reality.

So what can we do?

So what can we do? A labour plan for 2026

1) Get serious about internal solidarity

This sounds basic, but it is the foundation. Talk to your co-workers. Bring people into the union culture. Share information. Correct misinformation. Isolation is the employer’s best friend.

2) Enforce the agreement like it matters

When management ignores processes, document it. Use the union. File grievances where warranted. Push policy grievances where patterns exist. The employer relies on fatigue. It relies on people saying, “It’s not worth it.” We need to make it worth it.

3) Treat WFA as a collective fight, not an individual tragedy

WFA makes people feel alone, because it lands on you like a personal verdict. It isn’t. It’s a policy choice. We need to show up for workers facing WFA, make sure they know their rights, and pressure the employer to respect negotiated steps and timelines.

4) Refuse the fake choice on return-to-office

We are constantly told it’s either “full remote forever” or “five days in the office.” That’s nonsense.

A modern public service can have role-based flexibility, real accommodation, and real respect for workers’ time, while also managing office space intelligently and saving taxpayers money. The government’s own documents show the scale of savings possible when office space is reduced strategically.

If the government wants to talk about efficiency, let’s talk about efficiency for real.

5) Put political pressure where it belongs

Write MPs. Meet them. Show up at town halls. Bring stories, not just slogans. A worker explaining how RTO costs them hundreds a month, or how WFA chaos affects service delivery, is harder to dismiss than a talking point.

6) Build alliances outside our workplaces

Public service fights are not only “public service fights.” When public services get cut, communities feel it. When workers’ rights get weakened, employers everywhere take notes. Labour has to keep building coalitions with tenants’ groups, anti-poverty advocates, disability advocates, and anyone who understands that strong public services and strong worker rights are linked.

The point of all this

2025 was the reminder. 2026 is the test.

The employer will keep trying to chip away. Politicians will keep looking for quick fixes and easy scapegoats. And the media will keep hunting for simple narratives.

Our job is to stay organized, stay disciplined, and stay loud enough that they can’t do this quietly.

We don’t need panic. We need clarity.

We don’t need to “hope” they do the right thing. We need to make it costly not to.

In solidarity, we go into 2026 with our eyes open, our heads up, and our hands linked.

When it comes to blame, you will hear Liberals point at Conservatives and Conservatives point at Liberals, and the uncomfortable truth is both are right. The Harper government bought a deeply flawed system, and the Trudeau government continued with it anyway.

A decade later, you’d think this would be resolved. It isn’t. Tens of thousands of pay issues remain, and new ones continue to occur.

And what is the government doing now? Repeating the same mistake, pushing forward with another major system change without meaningful consultation with unions or affected workers. History tells us exactly where that leads.

Let’s also talk about cost. Phoenix was supposed to save $70 million per year. Instead, costs have ballooned to over $2 billion, not counting the human damage inflicted on workers and their families.

The lesson is painfully obvious: you do not fix systems that affect workers’ livelihoods without consulting the workers and their unions. Anything less is reckless and risks yet another avoidable disaster.

Fair to say, after 10 years, real consultation isn’t optional. It’s long overdue

This is not just trivia. Timing matters in labour relations. Employers know when workers are stretched thin. Governments know when the public is distracted. Families know when bills come due. Christmas week can amplify pressure, or it can expose how much power working people actually have when we act together.

So tonight, the day before Christmas, here is a short tour of labour history, in Canada and beyond. Each of these events is a reminder that rights were fought for, that solidarity has a cost, and that “the holiday season” has often been used as a lever in labour conflict.

Canada: winter pressure, real wins, and long fights

Windsor Ford strike ends near Christmas, and changes Canadian labour forever (December 1945)

In Canada, you cannot talk about labour history without talking about Windsor. The 1945 Ford strike in Windsor, Ontario did not end on a neat calendar page, but it did end right before Christmas, on December 19, 1945. It was a massive, high-stakes dispute over union security and the stability of collective bargaining.

What matters is what came after. The settlement path led to the Rand Formula in early 1946, which established the principle that everyone in the bargaining unit pays union dues, whether they join the union or not. This was a turning point. It strengthened unions financially, reduced free-riding, and helped stabilize labour relations across Canada.

The lesson for the movement is blunt: durable collective bargaining needs structures that protect it. The Rand Formula did not fall from the sky. It came from a real confrontation, in a real city, by workers who refused to be treated as disposable.

The Radio-Canada producers strike begins at the end of December (1958)

In late December 1958, Radio-Canada television producers in Montréal went on strike for union recognition and bargaining rights. That detail matters because it shows how far the fight for collective bargaining extended beyond factories and mines. This was cultural work, professional work, and public-facing work, and it still ran into the same wall: the refusal to treat workers as a collective with enforceable rights.

A late-December strike is not an accident. It is a calculated moment when the employer is vulnerable and when workers are putting personal holiday comfort on the line. That is a kind of courage that deserves to be named. The labour movement is not just “blue collar” history. It is also the story of workers in media, public institutions, and modern workplaces insisting that creative labour is labour, and it deserves the same respect.

A retail strike that starts in December and becomes a marathon (Prince George, 1983)

Retail work is often treated like it is not “real” labour organizing territory. Low wages, high turnover, and constant pressure. That is exactly why retail workers organizing is so important.

In Prince George, British Columbia, a Canadian Tire strike that began in December 1983 became a long, punishing dispute that dragged on for years. Whether you agree with every tactic used in that dispute, the significance is clear: retail workers were pushing back against a sector designed to keep workers isolated and replaceable.

The labour movement has always had to expand its reach. In every era, there are industries where people are told they are “unorganizable.” Those are usually the industries that most need a union.

Modern reminder: Canada Post disruption in the holiday window (December 2024)

Fast forward to today. Holiday-season labour disputes still carry enormous leverage because so much of the economy depends on seasonal delivery, logistics, and staffing. A Canada Post strike that was suspended in mid-December 2024 landed right in that pressure zone.

What is important here is not just the dispute itself, but the pattern: essential services, “economic stability,” and public inconvenience are regularly used as arguments to curb worker power. The movement has to be honest about that terrain. If your work is essential, the system will treat your right to strike as optional unless you defend it politically and legally, and unless you build public support that understands the stakes.

Outside Canada: tragedy, breakthroughs, and the state showing its hand

Italian Hall, Christmas Eve tragedy during a strike (Michigan, 1913)

It is impossible to write a Christmas Eve labour reflection without mentioning the Italian Hall disaster in Calumet, Michigan. On Christmas Eve in 1913, during the Copper Country strike, a Christmas party connected to striking miners and their families ended in tragedy after someone falsely shouted “fire.” The stampede killed 73 people, many of them children.

This is not a story people like to tell at the holidays. It is also a story the labour movement cannot afford to forget.

The importance is not just the tragedy itself, but what it reveals about class conflict. Strikes are not tidy events that stay on the picket line. They ripple through communities, through families, through churches and halls and kitchens. When a labour dispute becomes that intense, it creates an atmosphere where cruelty, panic, and reckless disregard for workers can flourish.

The lesson is painful: solidarity is also about care. When the movement is under attack, community spaces become part of the struggle. We protect each other, or we pay.

The New York rent strike begins right after Christmas (December 1907)

Not all labour history is about a workplace. In late December 1907, thousands of working-class tenants in New York’s Lower East Side launched a rent strike against sharp rent increases.

Why does a rent strike matter to the labour movement? Because wages and working conditions do not exist in a vacuum. If landlords can extract everything you gain at the bargaining table, you are still running in place. Tenant organizing, affordability fights, and labour organizing are linked. They always have been.

The deeper point is that working people have power beyond the workplace when we organize collectively. “Housing is a labour issue” is not a slogan dreamed up on social media. It is baked into history.

A new union is founded in late December, and it shapes industrial unionism (ACWA, 1914)

On December 26, 1914, garment workers founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America after splitting from the existing structure that they believed was failing them. That union became one of the most important forces in the development of industrial unionism, with strong organizing, strong social programs, and a vision of labour politics that went beyond narrow workplace bargaining.

There is a lesson in the date. Late December is when people are supposed to accept things as they are, to keep their heads down, to wait for the new year. Instead, these workers chose to build something new when the calendar said “be quiet.”

Sometimes the movement advances because workers refuse to wait for a “better time” to organize.

Eugene V. Debs is released on Christmas Day (1921)

On Christmas Day 1921, Eugene V. Debs was released after President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence. Debs had been imprisoned for his anti-war speech and his socialist organizing, and he remained a towering figure for working-class politics in the United States.

Whatever you think of Debs, the importance here is the principle: the labour movement has often been treated as a political threat, not just an economic one. When workers organize, they do not just bargain for pennies. They challenge who gets to make decisions, and that makes powerful people nervous.

Debs’ release on Christmas Day carries a kind of symbolism, whether Harding intended it or not. It reminds us that labour rights and civil liberties are connected. When governments clamp down, they often use the language of “order” and “peace,” and they usually mean obedience.

The state takes the railways to stop a strike (December 1943)

In late December 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, the U.S. federal government seized the railroads to avert a strike. Wartime always brings this question to the surface: will workers be allowed to exercise power, or will the state step in and declare the dispute unacceptable?

This matters because it exposes the limits of “rights” when governments decide the economy cannot be disrupted. That logic is not confined to wartime. You see it anytime a government talks about back-to-work legislation, compulsory arbitration, essential services, and “national interest.”

The labour movement has to read these moments clearly. The state is not neutral in labour disputes. Sometimes it is. Often it is not. Knowing the difference is part of being organized.

The Flint sit-down strike begins right after Christmas (December 1936)

The Flint sit-down strike began on December 30, 1936. Workers occupied GM plants and refused to leave, using a tactic that made it much harder to replace them. The strike helped force union recognition and became a major turning point for industrial unionism.

The importance here is tactical and political. The sit-down strike showed that workers could change the rules of the game when traditional methods were being crushed. It also showed that the workplace itself can be the site of power, not just the picket line outside it.

Ending the year with a fight like that is a reminder: labour’s victories were never gifts from employers. They were outcomes of strategy, sacrifice, and unity.

What Christmas week teaches the movement

If you step back from the details, Christmas-week labour history keeps circling the same truths. Power does not take holidays. Employers and governments make decisions year-round, so workers have to stay organized year-round too. And the movement has never been confined to one workplace. Rent strikes, media strikes, retail strikes, and industrial strikes are all different fronts of the same struggle for dignity and some real control over our lives.

It also reminds you that the state will step in when it feels forced to. Sometimes that intervention creates stability. Sometimes it strips workers of leverage. Either way, it is a warning that economic power alone is not enough. Workers need political strength to match it. And finally, all of this is a reality check about solidarity. It is not a slogan you dust off in speeches. It is community care, strike support, and the willingness to put something on the line for people you may never meet.

Tonight, on Christmas Eve, I am not interested in romanticizing struggle. People got hurt. People lost jobs. Families suffered. But I also refuse to pretend that labour history is something that happens in textbooks. It happens in December. It happens when people are tired. It happens when the stakes feel high and when the timing feels unfair.

That is exactly why these stories matter.

Solidarity

That’s how long it took Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting (ARFF) personnel to arrive after the February 17, 2025 crash at Toronto Pearson, where a passenger aircraft came to rest inverted. The Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report notes a response time of about five minutes. In normal life, five minutes is nothing. In an aircraft emergency involving fuel, smoke, fire risk, and injuries, five minutes can be the difference between an evacuation and a catastrophe.

Most passengers assume ARFF is always there, always ready, and always staffed to do more than drive the trucks. They should not have to wonder if the fire hall is short today.

But across Canada, ARFF is too often treated like a budget line instead of a life-saving service. When staffing gets stretched, readiness gets fragile. When readiness gets fragile, airports slide into reduced categories, narrower coverage windows, and operational restrictions that the public only discovers when flights are delayed or cancelled.

This is a worker issue and a passenger issue. It’s a safety issue. And it’s getting worse.

Why Canada needs to take ARFF seriously

Most people only think about airport firefighters when something goes wrong. That’s human nature. We want to believe the safety systems are fully staffed, properly equipped, and ready to move in seconds, at any hour, at any airport.

If you work around aviation, you know the uncomfortable truth: ARFF is too often run too close to the edge. When budgets tighten, staffing thins, and response capacity becomes conditional. And when capacity is conditional, the consequences show up fast: restrictions, delays, cancellations, and in the worst case, avoidable risk to human life.

I’m writing this as a Union of Canadian Transportation Employees (UCTE) member. These ARFF firefighters are my union siblings. Different jobs, same movement: workers who keep Canada running, workers who keep the public safe, workers who deserve the resources to do the job properly.

I’m also writing this as someone who flies. When I board a plane, I’m trusting more than pilots and maintenance. I’m trusting the whole system around that flight. ARFF is one of those quiet pillars most passengers never see. That’s exactly why it needs stronger public attention.

What ARFF is, and what it’s for

ARFF isn’t municipal firefighting at an airport. It’s a specialized emergency response built for aircraft incidents: crash rescue, rapid fire suppression, fuel hazards, mass casualty response, evacuations, and support to medical response.

It demands unique training, specialized vehicles, specific firefighting agents, and a readiness posture that is fundamentally different from a typical fire station.

In aviation emergencies, minutes matter. Seconds matter. A runway excursion, brake fire, cargo fire, hard landing, aborted takeoff, smoke in the cabin, any of these can escalate fast. When ARFF is properly resourced, the goal is simple and unforgiving:

Arrive fast. Stabilize the scene. Control fire risk. Keep evacuation routes survivable. Start rescue immediately.

That’s not “nice to have.” That is core safety.

What the rules require, and what they don’t

Under Canada’s current framework, “minimum staffing” is not spelled out as a simple headcount. It is framed as capability. During published ARFF hours, an airport must have trained personnel in sufficient number to operate the ARFF vehicles and apply the required extinguishing agents for the airport’s category.

That sounds fine on paper. But notice what it anchors to: staffing the vehicles and flowing the agents. It does not, by itself, describe a staffing model that ensures you can do those tasks while also performing hands-on rescue work in the same critical minutes.

That gap matters because ARFF agent requirements are not built to “put out the whole airplane.” They are built around the critical category and discharge rates, meant to rapidly control fire in the time-critical area that improves survivability and protects escape routes. Put plainly, the numbers are built to buy people time. That only works if there are enough trained responders on duty to make the first minutes count.

Canada also has built-in flexibility in how ARFF coverage is provided. Airports publish ARFF hours in the Canada Flight Supplement and, where applicable, via NOTAM (Notice to Aviation). Category changes are a recognized NOTAM trigger. In practice, when staffing drops, the system can shift into a managed downgrade: reduced category, narrower coverage windows, and operational restrictions.

Administratively, that may be neat. From a public safety standpoint, it means the baseline can change day to day.

This isn’t theoretical. In January 2022, St. John’s International Airport publicly said it couldn’t staff its fire hall to required levels, and the federal transport minister openly acknowledged passenger flights would be interrupted and cancelled until staffing was addressed. Then in October 2025, Wabush Airport saw disruptions because firefighting and crash rescue services were limited, with passenger limits tied to Transport Canada’s requirements, at a Transport Canada-owned and -operated airport. That’s the double standard in black and white: the regulator couldn’t meet the rules it enforces.

In practice, “minimum responders” becomes “minimum to staff the vehicles.” Run short, and readiness becomes a variable. On normal days, that means restrictions and cancellations. The bigger question is what happens on the worst day, when you don’t get to schedule the emergency around the gap.

Under-resourcing isn’t abstract. It changes what is possible.

When ARFF is understaffed or under-resourced, it doesn’t just make the job harder. It changes what the response can actually do.

It can mean fewer firefighters on duty than what’s needed for a full response. It can mean a station that’s technically open but not capable of meeting expectations if multiple incidents happen. It can mean aging equipment and costly maintenance. It can mean recruitment and retention failures that become chronic vacancies. It can mean burnout, forced overtime, and a slow erosion of readiness that nobody sees until the day it matters most.

And it can mean operational impacts the public does notice: delays, cancellations, last-minute chaos. Passengers experience “airport problems.” The real issue is a critical safety service being run too close to failure.

Wabush in October 2025 is a textbook example. Limited ARFF capacity became restrictions on aircraft and passengers, and real disruption to regional air access. Safety posture and operations failed together.

That’s why conditional readiness is so dangerous. Aviation risk is low-frequency and high-consequence. You cannot treat your safety net like it’s allowed to sag on quiet days.

If anyone doubts why minutes matter, go back to Toronto Pearson on February 17, 2025. A passenger aircraft crashed and ended up inverted. The TSB’s preliminary reporting notes ARFF arrived about five minutes after the accident. In an aircraft accident with fuel and fire risk, five minutes is an eternity.

And it’s not just about showing up. It’s about showing up with enough people to do multiple critical tasks at once: suppression to control fire risk, maintaining a survivable evacuation path, and immediate rescue support. Mutual aid is a good thing. But you can’t build an aviation safety system on “hopefully we can scramble enough resources when something happens.”

ARFF exists so the resources are already there.

I’ll say it plainly: running ARFF short isn’t efficiency. It’s gambling.

Why this is a labour issue

When we talk about ARFF, we are talking about workers being asked to carry an unacceptable burden.

Airport firefighters don’t control staffing levels. They don’t control budgets. They don’t decide whether positions get posted, filled, and trained on time. They don’t decide whether the fleet gets renewed, whether foam systems are updated, or whether leadership treats public safety as a priority instead of a cost to minimize.

But when something goes wrong, who is expected to run toward the danger, in all weather, on the worst day of somebody’s life?

The workers.

We’ve seen this play out across too many sectors: cut staffing, stretch the workforce, call it “flexibility,” and hope nothing breaks. Then when the cracks show, blame the front line for not performing miracles.

That’s not how safety works. That’s not how dignity at work works. And it’s not how you build resilient public services.

If Canada wants ARFF done right, it needs stable staffing models, fair compensation, real retention strategies, and training schedules that don’t rely on burnout to keep the lights on. That’s not asking for too much. That’s the minimum for a critical safety function.

Why this is a passenger issue

Most passengers assume that if an airport can host passenger flights, robust safety services are automatically in place. People don’t book a ticket thinking, “I wonder if the fire hall is staffed today.”

They shouldn’t have to.

Aviation is built on layers of safety. No single layer should be treated as optional. When ARFF capacity is thin, it injects uncertainty into the safety chain. It also erodes trust, because people can feel when a system is being run on fumes: vague explanations, stressed staff, constant reactive mode.

And if you are a parent traveling with kids, a senior traveling for medical care, or a worker traveling to earn a paycheque, cancellations aren’t a minor inconvenience. They’re missed connections, missed appointments, lost wages, and real hardship.

This is not only a labour issue. It’s a public issue.

What ARFF workers are really asking for

This should not be framed as “firefighters want more.” It should be framed as “Canada needs a safety service that matches the reality of modern aviation.”

Here’s what that looks like:

1. Adequate staffing, not bare-minimum staffing
   Staffing has to cover real-world operations: sick leave, training, vacations, and the reality that emergencies don’t schedule themselves. If the model only works on paper, it doesn’t work.
2. Sustainable funding that doesn’t pit safety against operations
   If airports are forced to choose between meeting operational demand and resourcing ARFF, the incentives get dangerous. Safety needs stable funding that can’t be squeezed on a whim.
3. Recruitment and retention that treats ARFF as the specialized profession it is
   Hard-to-fill positions are a signal: pay, schedules, housing costs, training bottlenecks, career progression. Fix the pipeline and support the people who want to do this work.
4. Modern equipment and reliable maintenance
   Specialized vehicles have lifecycles. Deferring replacement isn’t harmless. It transfers risk onto workers and the public.
5. Stronger national standards and accountability
   Safety should not depend on which airport you happen to fly from. Regional and smaller airports deserve serious safety systems, not “good enough.”
6. Respect for workers’ voices
   Front-line ARFF workers know where the gaps are. They see the close calls. Their voice should be central, not sidelined.

What I’m calling for

Here’s the short version: fund ARFF properly, staff it properly, regulate it properly, and stop pretending a threadbare safety net is a strategy.

More specifically, I’m calling for:

• A serious national commitment to strengthening ARFF standards and oversight, with transparent expectations and real enforcement.
• Dedicated resources to stabilize staffing, including recruitment, training capacity, and retention measures that keep experienced firefighters on the job.
• Capital investment plans that modernize ARFF equipment, not “eventually,” but on timelines that match risk.
• Public transparency when ARFF levels affect operations, because passengers deserve honesty and because sunlight forces better decision-making.
• A labour-respecting approach that treats ARFF workers as professionals, not as a cost to be minimized.

What you can do as a reader

If you are a union member, talk about this. Bring it to your local. Bring it to your union. Ask what’s being done to support ARFF workers and push for stronger safety standards.

If you are a frequent flyer, don’t dismiss this as internal airport business. When flights are disrupted due to safety coverage, that’s not “the system being annoying.” It’s a warning light on the dashboard. Ask questions. Write your MP. Demand public safety be treated like public safety.

If you are in government or airport leadership, here’s the challenge: stop managing ARFF like it’s optional. It isn’t. It is part of the promise we make to every passenger who buys a ticket in this country.

Solidarity and safety go together

I believe in a basic principle: workers should not be asked to do impossible jobs with inadequate tools. That’s true in ports, inspections, maintenance, and it’s absolutely true in airport rescue and firefighting.

ARFF firefighters don’t ask for headlines. They ask for readiness. They ask for enough people on shift to do the job safely. They ask for equipment that works. They ask for standards that match the risks. They ask for a system that invests in prevention before tragedy forces its hand.

As a UCTE member, I’m saying plainly: these are my union siblings, and their fight is a public safety fight. Canada can do better than “just barely.” We should demand better than “hoping nothing happens.”

Because one day, any of us could be on that plane.

Solidarity

Labour sponsored funds are much like any other mutual fund, except they are, as the name suggests, sponsored by labour. Instead of investing in Microsoft, Tesla, Apple, or Pfizer, labour sponsored funds invested in local companies like Nanoptix Inc., Enovex Technology Ltd., and STI Technologies. Companies that were not household names, but that had something far more important going for them. They were right here. They hired here. They trained here. They put money into local paycheques, local mortgages, local hockey registrations, local grocery carts, and local tax bases.

I was fortunate to work alongside three individuals, each with involvement with a different federation of labour: Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Danny King, who was Secretary-Treasurer of the New Brunswick Federation of Labour, a position I now hold. Back then I was new to the world of labour and, if I am being honest, I did not know much about unions beyond stereotypes and headlines.

One day, I asked Danny: “Why would labour sponsor a mutual fund?” From what little I thought I knew, it did not make sense to me why unions would want to support a mutual fund company, especially one that was not unionized.

His answer surprised me, and it stuck with me. “Labour,” he said, “supports labour sponsored mutual funds because the fund invests in our communities. It makes our communities stronger and provides good paying jobs. Unions look after each other, but also after our communities.”

That explanation has stayed with me for almost 25 years. I never expected I would follow in his footsteps, but here I am. And the older I get, the more I realize how simple and how profound that answer was. Labour invests in communities for one reason: workers live in communities. We cannot separate the quality of work from the quality of life. They rise together, or they fall together.

Labour is the quiet infrastructure holding communities together

When people think about labour, they often think about a union card and a bargaining table. That is part of it, of course. But labour is bigger than any single contract. Labour is the plumbing you only notice when it breaks.

In a healthy community, a job is not just a job. It is stability. It is a predictable schedule. It is paid sick time so you can stay home when your kid brings home the latest school virus. It is a wage that keeps a family out of crisis mode. It is training and apprenticeships and pathways for young people to build a life without leaving the province. It is safety rules that mean someone comes home with all ten fingers and both eyes.

When those things are missing, it shows up everywhere. It shows up in overdrawn bank accounts and payday loans. It shows up in food bank line-ups that get longer every winter. It shows up in small businesses struggling because people are spending every dollar on rent and interest. It shows up in mental health crises that could have been prevented if people had less stress and more control over their lives.

Labour understands this because labour is made of people who live it. Not as a theory. As a daily reality.

Why labour fights for communities, even for people without a union card

This is the part that some people do not understand, and it is worth saying plainly.

Unions do not fight for better wages, better benefits, and safer workplaces only because it is good for their members. They fight for those things because if working people are treated as disposable, the whole community becomes disposable.

There are at least five reasons labour has always fought beyond the unionized workplace.

1. Standards spread.
   When a union workplace raises the bar, nearby workplaces feel it. Employers have to compete. Not just on price, but on wages, benefits, and basic decency. That is not a threat. That is the market actually working for workers, not just for owners.
   
   If union wages rise, non-union employers in the same sector often follow, at least partially, to keep staff. That is how communities gradually improve. It is also why some employers fight unions so aggressively. It is not only about one contract. It is about the precedent.
   
   
2. A race to the bottom hurts everyone.
   When wages stagnate and benefits disappear, governments and families end up paying the difference. If a job does not provide dental coverage, people skip care until it becomes an emergency. If a job does not provide stability, people rely more on social programs. If a job does not provide enough to live, people leave town, and the local economy loses talent and energy.
   
   Labour fights to stop that race, because the winners are few and the costs are shared by everyone.
   
   
3. Public services are community services.
   Labour has always defended public healthcare, public education, safe roads, clean water, and reliable public infrastructure. Not because every worker in the community is unionized, but because everyone relies on these systems. People who mock unions one day still expect an ambulance the next. They still expect safe airports, safe ports, safe bridges, and inspections that catch problems before they become tragedies.
   
   You do not have to be a union member to benefit from a well-funded hospital or a properly staffed emergency room.
   
   
4. Labour is often the only organized voice pushing back.
   In many communities, big employers, lobby groups, and well-funded think tanks have a direct line into government. Working people rarely do. Labour is one of the few forces that can show up, read the fine print, and say: this policy looks good in a press release, but it will hurt people in real life.
   
   Labour is not perfect, and it should always be challenged to stay democratic and accountable. But when labour is absent, working people are almost always weaker.
   
   
5. Solidarity is not charity. It is self-respect.
   Labour does not help communities out of pity. Labour helps communities because workers are the community. Your neighbour is a nurse. Your cousin works construction. Your kid’s bus driver is a worker. The person serving your coffee is a worker. The person repairing your furnace in February is a worker.
   
   When we talk about community investment, we are talking about investing in the people who keep the community alive.

Investment is not just money. It is what we choose to build.

That is what the labour sponsored fund conversation really taught me. Investment is a moral choice, not only a financial one.

When a community invests in local businesses, local training, local manufacturing, local innovation, we are building resilience. We are saying we want good jobs here, not just low taxes and cheap labour.

Labour thinks this way naturally because unions see the long game. A union is built on the idea that you cannot win for one person by abandoning everyone else. You win by lifting together. You do not sacrifice the next generation for this quarter’s profits.

And to be clear, labour’s vision of investment is not “throw money at anything and hope it sticks.” Labour cares about good jobs. The kind of jobs that come with training, safety, stability, and dignity. Jobs where you can build a life, not just survive until payday.

Labour’s community work is often invisible, but it is everywhere

If you have spent any time around labour councils, federations of labour, locals, and committees, you have seen it.

You have seen labour raise money for families after a house fire. You have seen labour volunteer at food banks. You have seen labour advocate for domestic violence leave. You have seen labour push for stronger health and safety rules after a workplace death. You have seen labour fight for accessibility and inclusion, even when it is unpopular and even when it costs political capital.

Sometimes labour’s work looks like bargaining. Sometimes it looks like lobbying. Sometimes it looks like a picket line. And sometimes it looks like a bunch of tired people in union jackets setting up chairs for a community meeting because no one else will.

That is not a marketing strategy. That is identity.

The real reason labour keeps fighting, even when it is hard

Here is the honest truth. Labour fights for communities because we have learned what happens when we do not.

We have seen what “flexibility” means when it only flows one way. We have seen what austerity does to hospitals, schools, and public safety. We have seen what happens when governments celebrate “efficiency” while outsourcing work, weakening accountability, and hollowing out local capacity. We have seen what happens when young workers cannot afford housing, cannot access stable jobs, and cannot picture a future in the place they grew up.

Labour does not fight because it enjoys conflict. Labour fights because complacency is expensive, and the bill always lands on working people.

Bringing it back to Danny’s answer

When Danny told me unions look after each other and also after our communities, he was describing something bigger than unions. He was describing a worldview.

A community is not strong because it has a few wealthy people. It is strong because working people can live decently. Because seniors can retire with dignity. Because young people can stay and build a life. Because when someone gets sick, they can get care. Because when someone gets hurt at work, it is treated as unacceptable, not inevitable.

That is what labour is really about. It is the belief that the people who do the work should be able to live with dignity where they live.

I have talked to MPs and senators in New Brunswick and on Parliament Hill with that belief in my pocket, even when the room is skeptical, even when the politics are ugly, even when the headlines try to reduce everything to unions being “greedy” or “out of touch.” I have seen too much to buy that story.

Labour is not out of touch. Labour is in touch with the rent. With grocery bills. With understaffed workplaces. With unsafe conditions. With the pressure families feel. With the ways people quietly fall behind.

And that is why labour invests in our communities, fights for our communities, and refuses to apologize for it.

Because when working people win, communities win. Even the ones who never signed a union card.

Solidarity

Inclusion, as New Brunswick describes it, is not supposed to mean that every student must remain in the same classroom all day, every day, regardless of what happens. It is meant to mean that the default is a shared learning environment, with reasonable and meaningful supports, accommodations, and planning so students can participate with their peers, learn, socialize, and grow. When that works, it is powerful. It reduces stigma, it builds empathy, it allows friendships to form naturally, it teaches kids how to live in a real community, and it can deliver better outcomes than isolation ever could. But inclusion is not just a placement decision. Inclusion is a model, and models have requirements. They need staffing. They need training. They need time. They need space. They need access to specialized supports when needs are complex, and they need clear processes to adjust when the classroom environment cannot safely meet a student’s needs in that moment. Without those conditions, inclusion stops being a humane answer and becomes a cheap answer, the kind of answer governments love because it looks good in a policy statement and costs less than building what the policy actually implies.

Here is what frustrates me to no end: the public debate keeps drifting into extremes, and the people living in the middle are getting crushed. On one side, anyone who raises concerns gets treated like they are attacking children with special needs, as if asking for safety and stability in a classroom is the same thing as opposing a child’s right to belong. On the other side, some people respond to the chaos by wanting a return to segregation as a blanket solution, because they are desperate and they see no other lever to pull. But most teachers, most educational assistants, most parents, and honestly most reasonable people are not living in ideological extremes. They are living in day to day reality. They believe in the “why” of inclusion, and they are drowning in the “how.” They know what it is supposed to look like, and they also know what it looks like when it is not working. They see the same patterns over and over: escalating behaviour with too little early intervention, students with complex needs placed into classrooms without the consistent supports required, EAs stretched across multiple situations, teachers improvising plans on the fly, and an entire class losing time and a sense of safety because the system has become reactive instead of proactive.

If you want to understand why people are angry, start with what is happening inside a classroom when inclusion is implemented without enough resources. The teacher is trying to teach a lesson to twenty or twenty-five kids, some of whom already need extra support for reading, language, attention, anxiety, or just the normal life chaos kids carry. The EA may be assigned, but often not consistently, sometimes shared across multiple classes, sometimes pulled away to cover another crisis. A student who is struggling, who may be overwhelmed by sensory input, change, frustration, or a learning task that feels impossible, begins to escalate. If the system is working properly, there is a plan, a calm space, a predictable de-escalation routine, and trained support available early enough to prevent a full explosion. If the system is not working, there is a point where the escalation becomes a disruption, then a meltdown, then a safety issue. The classroom can be evacuated. Other children are told to leave, sometimes quickly, sometimes with fear in their eyes, because they know what is coming. While they are out in the hall, their learning stops. Their sense of safety takes a hit. Their trust in school as a stable place erodes a little more. Then the room can be left damaged, the teacher’s supplies destroyed, the learning environment they built with their own money and effort trashed in minutes. This is not a rare story. This is a regular occurrence. People can debate it on paper, but anyone who has relationships in schools, anyone who talks to teachers and EAs honestly, knows it is happening.

That is where I need to be blunt, because the polite version has not fixed anything. Kids should not have to go to school and wonder whether the child next to them is going to hurt them. They should not have to worry about their own belongings being destroyed. They should not have to be the ones evacuated from their classroom because the system cannot support one student’s needs without putting everyone else at risk. School should be a safe environment to promote learning, life skills, and social interaction, not a place where children are exposed to violence and chaos as if it is normal. It is not normal. It should never be treated as normal. And it is not fair to the child who is escalating either, because that child is often signalling, loudly and painfully, that their needs are not being met, that they are overwhelmed, that they require supports that are not actually present in a consistent way. When we leave a child without what they need until they explode, then we respond by evacuating a classroom or restraining them or isolating them, we are not doing inclusion. We are doing crisis management, and we are asking children, staff, and families to absorb the fallout of government decisions.

The staff in schools are paying the price in ways that people outside education do not always see. Educational assistants are placed in impossible positions, expected to prevent harm without enough coverage, without enough backup, sometimes without enough training time to keep up with what the job has become. Teachers are asked to deliver curriculum, manage behaviour, differentiate instruction, document everything, communicate with families, and maintain a calm environment, while also becoming de facto front-line responders to violent incidents. This wears people down. Not the normal tired that comes with a hard job, but a deep fatigue that changes how people talk about their profession. Teachers start thinking about leaving, not because they do not love kids, but because the job has become unsafe and unsustainable. They worry about injuries, about trauma, about what happens when they are the only adult in the room at the wrong moment. They worry about their classrooms, too, and that matters more than people realize. Teachers pour themselves into building a positive learning environment, often at their own expense, because schools do not give them the funding to make classrooms warm and inviting. They buy the decorations, the bins, the sensory tools, the flexible seating, the little touches that make kids feel safe and welcomed. Then they watch it get destroyed. That is not just property damage. It is emotional damage. It is the feeling that your effort does not matter, that the system will not protect what you have built, and that you are expected to rebuild again and again while being told this is simply the cost of doing the right thing.

We also need to talk honestly about public incidents, because they matter, and because they show where the legal and moral lines actually are. There have been publicly reported cases in New Brunswick where school staff experienced repeated assaults and threats from a student with complex needs, where the situation escalated over long periods, where staff suffered serious harm including trauma, and where labour arbitration decisions criticized the employer for failing to maintain a safe workplace while implementing inclusion. Those decisions highlight the tension that governments want to avoid naming: inclusive education is a right, but a safe workplace is also a right, and a safe learning environment for other students is also a right. When people say “inclusion,” they sometimes talk as if it overrides everything else. It does not. It cannot. If the practical outcome of policy is that staff are being injured and other students are being harmed, then the system is out of balance, and the answer is not to shame the people raising the alarm. The answer is to fix the conditions that are making inclusion fail in practice.

Now, from the government perspective, I can already hear the response. They will say they believe in inclusion. They will say they have invested in education. They will announce new positions, new initiatives, new strategies, new committees, new plans. Some of that will be sincere. Some of it will even help in pockets. But the lived experience in many schools is that the resources still do not match the need, the staffing levels still do not match the complexity, the wait times for assessments and supports still create gaps where problems grow, and schools are still left managing crises that could have been prevented with adequate early intervention. Governments love to fund the visible parts of education, the things that fit cleanly into a press release, but inclusion is not a press release. Inclusion is a daily operational reality, and it only works when the resources are systemic and consistent, not occasional and reactive.

What about the perspective of the student who is being “included,” the child at the centre of the storm? This is where the conversation can become cruel if we are not careful, and I refuse to go there. A child who is dysregulated, who is acting out, who is destroying things or lashing out physically, is not doing it because they are evil. They are doing it because something in their world is not working, inside them or around them or both. Sometimes it is sensory overload. Sometimes it is frustration and shame. Sometimes it is trauma. Sometimes it is a disability that requires supports most people have never been trained to provide. When the system fails that child, it fails them in a predictable way: the child escalates, gets punished or removed, returns without the conditions changing, escalates again, and everyone starts to define them by their worst moments. That is heartbreaking. It is also avoidable. But it is only avoidable if we build the supports that reduce escalation before it becomes violence and destruction, and if we create pathways that allow a student to receive targeted intervention without turning their education into isolation or turning everyone else’s education into repeated disruption.

So what are the options, really, if we stop pretending the only choices are “full inclusion no matter what” or “bring back segregation”? There are practical, balanced options that respect the values behind inclusion while taking safety and learning seriously. We can properly fund school-based teams so teachers and EAs are not alone, including behaviour specialists and mental health supports that are accessible quickly, not months later after a string of incidents. We can ensure EA coverage is adequate and consistent, not constantly shuffled because the system is short everywhere. We can build real planning time into the workday so teachers and EAs can coordinate supports and de-escalation strategies as a team, because improvisation is not a strategy. We can create safe, supervised spaces in schools designed for regulation and support, not punishment, where a student can step out early, before the classroom is destroyed and before anyone gets hurt. We can make it easier, not harder, to adjust a student’s learning environment temporarily when the classroom cannot meet their needs safely in that moment, as long as there is a clear plan, a clear purpose, and a real pathway back. We can also be honest that some students may need different settings for parts of their day or for periods of time, and that providing those supports is not a betrayal of inclusion, it is the work of making inclusion real.

Here is my bottom line. Inclusion is a values choice, but it is also a resource choice. You cannot claim the moral high ground of inclusion while refusing to fund what inclusion requires. You cannot celebrate inclusion in policy documents and then leave teachers, educational assistants, and students to cope with chaos and harm as the practical expression of that policy. You cannot ask the whole class to pay the price, academically and emotionally, because the province is unwilling to invest in the supports that would prevent crisis situations from becoming routine. If New Brunswick wants to keep its reputation for inclusion, it has to earn it again, in the real world, in the day to day lived reality of classrooms, where safety is non-negotiable, where learning time is protected, where staff are supported, and where the student with complex needs is not set up to fail. Inclusion done right is humane and it works. Inclusion done cheaply is neither humane nor effective, and right now too many classrooms are living proof.

If you work in the federal public service, you can feel that “sharper view” in your inbox and in your stomach.

Right now, the official line is a minimum of three days a week in the office for most workers, with executives expected to be there four days as of September 2024. That direction came down without real consultation and in direct contradiction to the spirit of the telework letter of agreement PSAC fought for in the 2023 strike, where remote work was one of the key issues that pushed members onto the line.

Now unions are dealing with persistent rumours of an even harsher directive based on leaks of internal Treasury Board documents that pointed to full time in person work by 2027. CAPE and PSAC have both raised alarms, warning that a five day mandate would be unworkable given how gutted many federal buildings are and how little actual office space is ready for people.

So the question almost writes itself:

If the government is serious about tackling the housing crisis and modernizing public services, why is it even entertaining the idea of packing us back into half empty offices instead of finally putting those buildings to better use?

Who is this really for?

Let us start with what the push is not about.

It is not about productivity. Statistics Canada’s own research found that the explosion in telework during the pandemic did not tank productivity. Many teleworkers reported being at least as productive or more productive at home, and federal labour productivity in public administration actually grew between 2019 and 2023.

It is not about fairness either. The Treasury Board’s “Direction on prescribed presence in the workplace” talks about consistency and fairness, but the government then updated the Telework Directive in a way that removed explicit references to work life balance, inclusion and environmental sustainability. Those are not minor details. Those are exactly the reasons many of us need telework in the first place.

And it is definitely not about “listening to workers.” The three day mandate was imposed while unions were still in a joint telework process that was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of unilateral decision.

So who is happy about a five day rumour?

You don’t have to look far. For years now, business groups and some politicians have been very open about wanting federal workers back at their desks to save struggling downtowns. Premier Doug Ford said outright that federal public servants needed to go back to the office to support Ottawa’s core. The Treasury Board’s announcement about ramping up to three days came shortly after.

More recently, Carney’s back to office hints came in a friendly fireside chat at a Mayor’s Breakfast, with Ottawa’s mayor Mark Sutcliffe pressing on jobs and downtown businesses. The symbolism is not subtle.

The message to public servants is clear: your commute, your family life, your accessibility needs and your bargaining victories are all negotiable. The profits of downtown landlords and the political comfort of certain mayors are not.

The leadership vacuum after the pandemic

What makes this even more frustrating is the opportunity the federal government already had to lead coming out of the COVID pandemic.

In those first years, when entire office towers were sitting empty and millions of people were suddenly working from their kitchen tables, a lot of large employers were looking to government for signals. Not because Ottawa has all the answers, but because the federal public service is one of the largest and most visible white collar workforces in the country. What the government chose to do with its own people would send a message about what “normal” might look like after lockdowns.

This was a chance to say clearly:

• We have learned that many jobs can be done effectively from home.
• We are going to embrace telework and hybrid work as a permanent, modern way of organizing public service work.
• We will design rules that are flexible, equitable and rooted in evidence, and we will model that for other employers across the country.

Instead, the federal government shrank from that responsibility.

For months at a time, departments drifted in silence, leaving managers and workers to improvise unofficial arrangements. When direction finally came, it was often vague, contradictory, or reversed with little warning. The centre hesitated to call telework a right, even after unions made it a central bargaining issue. It avoided saying out loud what everyone could see: that we had turned a corner, and there was no going back to a world where everyone is at a desk downtown five days a week.

Rather than leading by example, the government treated telework like an awkward temporary measure that it might quietly walk back later if nobody protested too loudly. That is exactly what we are living now.

The result is a vacuum where business lobby groups, downtown Business Improvement Area’s (BIA) and a handful of politically connected mayors have all stepped in to say what hybrid “should” look like, while the federal employer nods along and pretends it is just following some neutral logic about productivity and culture.

All of this points to something deeper. At some point we also have to name what is going on here. This is not just caution or prudence. It is a federal government that does not have the courage to stand up for its own workers and say, clearly, that telework and flexible hybrid models are here to stay. Instead of using the public service to pull the country into the twenty first century, it keeps flinching at the first sign of pressure from BIAs, landlords and a handful of loud mayors who miss the lunch rush. Ottawa loves to talk about “modernization,” but when it is time to choose between its talking points and the lives of the people who actually keep the machinery running, it folds.

Canadians are exhausted with governments that chase headlines and votes instead of real progress. You can feel that frustration every time someone talks about housing, climate, health care or public services and hears yet another announcement with no follow through. Telework is no different. A government that believed in the future would use this moment to protect flexible work, shrink its footprint, convert buildings to housing and lead by example. A government that is scared of its own shadow will keep floating trial balloons about five day mandates, hoping that pleasing a few downtown interests will buy it more time.

In a country where governments constantly talk about “innovation,” “the future of work” and “modernizing public services,” it is telling that our biggest employer chose silence and indecision instead of courage and clarity at the one moment when it was actually expected to lead.

Meanwhile, the housing file is on fire

At the exact same time, the federal government is telling Canadians that it understands the scale of the housing crisis and that it is ready to do things differently.

Budget 2024 launched the “Public Lands for Homes” plan, promising to unlock a quarter of a million new homes on public lands by 2031 and to reduce the footprint of federal office buildings, including conversions of some to housing. In August, Public Services and Procurement Canada rolled out the Canada Public Land Bank, listing dozens of federal properties that could support housing, including major sites in Ottawa, Toronto, Montréal, Calgary and Edmonton.

On paper, it sounds transformative.

In practice, the Auditor General has just finished telling us that the government has made scant progress on actually offloading unused office space or turning it into homes. Over several years, PSPC managed to reduce its office footprint by only a tiny fraction, despite long standing plans to cut it in half and save billions.

Half of this story is “government is moving too slowly.” The other half is “government cannot decide what it wants.”

You cannot credibly promise to shrink the federal office footprint and convert surplus buildings into housing while simultaneously floating a five day in person mandate that makes every deputy minister terrified to give up floor space. The Auditor General actually flagged this dynamic, noting that new in person requirements are making departments more hesitant to vacate buildings even when they know they do not need them.

Every time Treasury Board tightens the in office screws, it undercuts the housing plan it is supposedly helping to deliver. Empty desks become politically defended territory rather than a golden opportunity to build homes.

Commuters versus neighbours

There is also a basic misunderstanding at play about who actually supports local businesses.

I keep hearing the argument that downtowns are suffering because public servants are not there five days a week, and that the only way to revive main streets is to drag everyone back to their cubicles.

But commuters and neighbours are not the same thing.

Commuters show up between 8 and 4, often grab coffee and maybe a quick lunch, then vanish. They do not need child care around the corner from their home, they do not go to the local pharmacy at 8 p.m., and they rarely spend weekends in the core unless there is a festival.

Residents are there every day. The same federal office towers that now sit half empty could be mixed use buildings where people live upstairs and work or study nearby. Those new residents would buy groceries, use transit, support restaurants and fill parks seven days a week, not just at lunchtime on a Tuesday.

Carney himself has said Canada needs to “build more homes, faster” and has talked about a public lands acquisition fund and a massive push on affordable housing. You do not get there by hoarding surplus office space for a future that looks suspiciously like 2015, just so a few landlords and BIAs can pretend nothing changed.

If we want vibrant downtowns, we should be cheering for conversions, co-ops and mixed income housing in federal buildings, not insisting that the only legitimate activity in those spaces is paperwork.

A national public service, not an Ottawa company town

There is another piece that gets lost when mayors talk as if the federal public service belongs to them: most public servants are not in the National Capital Region.

Treasury Board’s own demographic snapshots show that a majority of federal public servants work in the regions, and a large minority in the NCR. In other words, most federal workers live and work in communities across the country.

When the government designs telework and presence policies primarily around the needs of downtown Ottawa businesses, it is not just ignoring workers. It is ignoring the rest of Canada.

Telework and remote friendly hiring have finally made it possible for more people to build federal careers from places like Moncton, Regina, Iqaluit or Prince Rupert without uprooting their families to Gatineau. Pulling everyone back toward central offices again would tilt the system back toward the old Ottawa company town model that so many of us have been trying to get away from.

If this government is serious about regional economic development, keeping federal jobs in communities and making the public service more representative, then telework is an ally, not an obstacle.

Telework is an equity and climate tool

For many workers, telework is not a lifestyle perk. It is what makes work possible.

Workers with disabilities who struggle with inaccessible transit or buildings. Parents and caregivers who are juggling elder care, child care and inflexible school schedules. Workers who cannot afford housing anywhere near the office because the same housing crisis the government says it wants to solve has pushed prices through the roof.

PSAC has already pointed out that the new Telework Directive quietly stripped out commitments to work life balance, inclusion and environmental sustainability that existed in the 2020 version. Yet these are exactly the values the government claims to be championing in its diversity and accessibility policies.

On climate, the hypocrisy is just as stark. Transportation is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, and studies have documented how working from home can significantly cut commuting and car use. Every extra mandatory commute is more traffic, more emissions and more pressure on crowded transit systems that are already struggling.

If the government really believes in a green public service, it should be celebrating telework as low hanging fruit, not treating it as a problem to be solved.

What a sane approach would look like

None of this means that offices disappear or that in person work has no place. I am not arguing for a fully virtual public service where nobody ever meets face to face.

What I am arguing is that the starting point should be:

• Make telework a real, enforceable right in our collective agreements, not a policy the employer can rewrite whenever a mayor complains.
• Recognize that many jobs can be done mostly or fully remotely, and set presence expectations based on the work, not on vibes about “culture” or “team spirit.”
• Cap mandated presence at something reasonable like one or two anchor days a week where there is a clear operational need, rather than drifting toward five by rumour and attrition.
• Accelerate the disposal and conversion of genuinely surplus office buildings to housing under the Public Lands for Homes plan, instead of freezing everything in place while Ottawa debates how many days it wants to see lanyards downtown.
• Build real mixed use, housing rich downtowns that are supported by people who live there, not commuters who are forced to show up because their jobs depend on it.

Most importantly, the government needs to stop pretending this is a minor HR tweak. It is not. It is a choice about whose interests it serves.

Empty desks or homes for people?

We are at a crossroads.

On one side, there is a future where federal buildings stay half empty most of the week, kept “just in case” we go back to a 1990s model of office life. Workers spend more time commuting, less time with their families, and we blow a historic chance to turn public land into public good.

On the other side, there is a future where telework is treated as a normal part of how a modern public service functions. Where the federal footprint shrinks in a planned way, and each building we let go becomes a chance to build housing people can actually afford. Where downtowns are full of neighbours instead of only desk workers, and where regions across the country share more fairly in federal employment.

The rumours about a five day mandate tell us which way the wind in Ottawa is currently blowing. The housing crisis, the climate crisis and basic respect for workers tell us that wind is blowing in the wrong direction.

If the Carney government is serious about building Canada homes, it needs to stop building a case for empty desks and start treating telework, housing and the future of our cities as one conversation, not three separate talking points.

Public servants, unions, municipal leaders and community groups have a role to play in forcing that conversation to happen. Because at the end of the day, the question is simple:

Are we going to keep paying to heat and cool empty space so a few people can feel better about lunch traffic, or are we finally going to put public buildings back in the service of the public?

The situation that unfolded for one member, who I will keep anonymous, serves as a painful example of this. After experiencing a health decline recently, she made the difficult but responsible decision to take a leave from her workplace under disability provisions. For many workers, especially in the public service, this is a long and exhausting process. The stigma alone can be suffocating. In her case, however, her union involvement had been one of the only stabilizing forces in her life, a source of community, purpose, and human connection during an otherwise isolating time.

She did not want, nor did she need, to withdraw from her union activism. In fact, both her doctor and her psychiatrist strongly encouraged her to continue participating in the aspects of union life that were manageable for her. They recognized that activism, advocacy, and community engagement were protective factors for her mental health. They helped her structure her leave in a way that respected medical limitations while still allowing her to maintain the parts of her life that supported her well being. And she had been doing exactly that, participating thoughtfully, contributing meaningfully, and staying connected to the broader labour movement she cares so deeply about.

So when she sought to remain involved in a regional council in a role that did not require travel, did not jeopardize her health, and did not interfere with her leave, she expected the union to support her. After all, we preach that the labour movement belongs to all of us, not just to the able bodied, not just to the politically connected, and not just to those whose disabilities are easy for others to understand.

Instead, she encountered one barrier after another.

The Constitution was invoked, but not the Constitution as written. It was the Constitution as interpreted through an inconsistent and at times arbitrary lens. Rather than approaching her with compassion, nuance, or even a willingness to engage in good faith discussion, she was told that she could not hold office because of her disability leave. The justification hinged on a restrictive interpretation of membership categories that, in fact, were never intended to apply to individuals on disability or workplace injury leave. Other categories of non dues paying members have explicit prohibitions, but her category, the one that includes members with disabilities on leave, is notably absent from those restrictions.

This is where the union’s response became not only incorrect, but deeply hypocritical.

Those with long memories in the labour movement know that exceptions have been made before. Waivers have been granted. Members in similar or even identical situations have been allowed to continue in elected positions when it suited the preferences or relationships of certain leaders. The Constitution has been treated at times as a rigid, immovable barrier, and at other times as a flexible set of guidelines, stretched or softened depending on who was asking and who was listening. The difference appears to come down not to principle, but to connections. Not to fairness, but to familiarity. Not to equity, but to convenience.

When members with disabilities see that kind of inconsistency, the message is unmistakable. Your place here is conditional. Your rights can be suspended without cause. Your voice is welcomed only when it fits within someone else’s comfort zone.

In the case of this member, there was an additional layer of irony. The justification provided to her hinted at a paternalistic concern that her involvement in the union might somehow jeopardize her long term disability benefits if the insurer became aware that she was still participating in union work. The idea that a member’s activism could be weaponized by an insurance company is unfortunately not far fetched. We have all seen how insurers scrutinize and challenge workers with disabilities. But here is the contradiction. Instead of defending her right to participate in her union without fear, instead of supporting her autonomy and dignity, instead of pushing back against potential overreach from an insurer, the union chose to police her involvement on its own. In doing so, it carried out the insurer’s work for them.

This is not solidarity. It is not accessibility. It is not justice. It is risk avoidance framed as constitutional obligation.

When members with disabilities are told that they cannot hold roles that support their mental health, roles that medical professionals have explicitly endorsed, what are we saying to them? That disability disqualifies them? That their contributions are less valued? That their presence becomes inconvenient the moment it requires the union to interpret its own rules with even a minimal level of humanity?

Even more troubling is that this decision ultimately pushed her to resign from the council. Not because she lacked capacity. Not because she lacked support from her peers. Not because she was unable to perform the duties. She stepped down because the union created an environment in which she felt unwelcome, scrutinized, and surveilled simply for trying to stay connected to work that gave her strength.

The cost of that loss goes beyond one member. It sends a message to every worker with a disability, every member on leave, and every activist struggling with mental health challenges. The message is clear. Be careful how visible you are. Be careful how involved you are. Your participation may be seen as a liability.

That is not the message a union should ever send.

The labour movement talks constantly about inclusivity, but inclusivity is not measured by slogans. It is measured by how we treat people who do not fit neatly into our systems. It is measured by whether we support or undermine members who are already fighting to maintain stability in their lives. It is measured by whether we honour the principle that a union is not merely a workplace bargaining entity, but a community that must remain accessible to members with disabilities in the same way it is accessible to everyone else.

The hypocrisy of granting flexibility to some while denying it to others deepens that injustice. It undermines trust. It damages the solidarity that unions rely on to function. It forces members like her, dedicated, passionate, and competent members, to step away not because they want to, but because the union has made it impossible for them to stay.

If our movement is serious about accessibility, then we need to confront these contradictions directly. We need clear, consistent interpretation of constitutional provisions. We need processes that are supportive, not punitive. We need to stop invoking the insurer as an excuse to push members with disabilities out of sight. Most of all, we need to start living up to the values we say we believe in.

For every member who walks away quietly, dozens more are watching, wondering if there will be space for them if illness, injury, or disability ever touches their life. They are watching to see whether the union they support will support them in return.

Solidarity is not something we say. It is something we practice. When we fail to practice it, people get hurt.

This member should never have been made to feel like a burden, a risk, or an inconvenience. She should not have been pressured into resigning from a role that brought her purpose. And she should never have been subjected to inconsistent rules that appear to bend for some and harden for others.

If the union wants to rebuild trust, it must start with a simple commitment. Treat members with disabilities with the same dignity, respect, and fairness afforded to everyone else. Until that happens, the gap between our values and our actions will continue to grow, and the people most harmed will be the ones who already face the greatest barriers.

Solidarity!