Written by Professors Dalia Gesualdi-Fecteau, Anne-Julie Rolland, and Gilles Trudeau, labour law professors at the University of Montreal and members of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT)
While we are still taking stock of the federal government’s intervention in the recent Air Canada strike—where section 107 of the Canada Labour Code was invoked in an attempt to end a work stoppage (described in the recent blog article by Professor David Doorey) – a bill introduced by the Quebec government last May will grant governments unprecedented power to intervene during a strike or a lock out. Taken together, these interventions signal a troubling evolution in Canadian labour relations: the growing normalization of executive powers to curtail strikes in the name of the “public interest”.
In May 2025, the Quebec government adopted Bill 89 (2025, c. 14), which claims to “better account for the needs of the population” during strikes and lockouts. The title sounds reassuring. But make no mistake: this proposed legislation marks a major retreat in workers’ rights – especially the right to strike, a cornerstone of our social democracy.
Under the guise of protecting the public, Bill 89 gives the government new powers that undermine the balance of power between workers and employers. It introduces sweeping changes to the Quebec Labour Code that make it easier to shut down strikes or reduce their impact and force arbitration — a major shift in the way labour disputes are resolved in Quebec.
Perceived by many as the worst setback in terms of collective labour rights since the advent of the Labour Code, Bill 89 proposes two major changes to how strikes are managed. First, it gives the Minister of Labour who deems a strike harmful to the public — based on vague criteria like “serious or irreparable harm” — the power to unilaterally end a strike or lockout, or prevent it if it has not yet started, by imposing binding arbitration. This provision applies to a wide range of sectors — including transportation, food processing, or private eldercare.
Second, Bill 89 expands mandatory service requirements during a strike in sectors deemed important to the general “well-being of the population”. Before a strike or lockout begins or after it has begun, the government can issue a decree naming a specific employer and its certified union as being subject to this new “well-being” services regime. The decree will bring the Administrative Labour Tribunal to assess, at the request of a party, whether services should be maintained during the strike or lockout and likely require workers – working both in the public and the private sectors with only few exceptions – to continue providing services during a strike. The “well-being” services to be maintained are those which would be considered necessary to prevent the social, environmental or economic security of the population from being disproportionately affected by the strike or lock-out. Unlike the well-established concept of “essential services,” which applies only when health or safety is at risk, “well-being” could be interpreted to include anything from inconvenience to profit loss. In some cases, the rules on essential services are likely to overlap the changes brought by Bill 89. For example, a public transit strike or a food delivery slowdown might now be grounds to demand continued service, weakening the effectiveness of any collective action.
The result? Confusion, overlapping rules, and a flood of legal challenges. Strikes could be halted before they even begin, and every conflict might require months of litigation to determine whether the restrictions apply.
From a historical perspective, Bill 89 represents a sharp departure from the foundational principles that have shaped Quebec’s labour relations system in the past six decades. Throughout the 20th century, Quebec gradually moved away from a model of state paternalism and employer dominance toward one that emphasized collective bargaining, union autonomy, and legal recognition of workers’ rights.
Bill 89 threatens to reverse this legacy. By recentralizing power in the hands of the state, particularly through the discretionary authority granted to the Minister of Labour and the expanded powers of the Tribunal, it echoes an older model of labour relations—one where the government acted as an arbitrator of last resort, often favouring order over equity.
Bill 89 reintroduces executive discretion where legal predictability once prevailed, and re-politicizes labour conflicts in a way that risks undermining decades of progress. It introduces differentiated treatment between workplaces, even within the same sector of activity. In this sense, the bill does not simply regulate the right to strike — it repositions the role of the state in ways that contradict the core values of labour law.
While the Minister of Labour has assured Parliament that he would use his new powers sparingly, he stated just this week, in the context of the ongoing strike by Montreal public transportation maintenance workers, that Bill 89 could have been a game-changer if only it were effective. Although the law will not come into force until next November, the shift in the way labour disputes are resolved in Quebec is already being felt.
In July 2025, media outlets reported that four McGill faculty associations, representing more than 500 professors, filed a judicial review application, asking that Bill 89 be declared unconstitutional and invalid from the moment of its enactment. It is likely that several other unions and labour federations will follow suit, launching their own constitutional challenges against Bill 89.