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CP trains rolling today after Senate passes bill
OTTAWA -- Back-to-work legislation for striking Canadian Pacific Rail workers cleared the Senate to become law Thursday, but Labour Minister Lisa Raitt is predicting it will take weeks to clear the backlog of freight once trains start rolling today.
Some 4,800 locomotive engineers, conductors, yardmen and others walked off the job nine days ago, crippling the country's biggest freight rail carrier.
CP Rail said it planned to have cars rolling 12 hours after the bill received royal assent. Even before the final Senate vote, Via Rail, which uses some CP track, told customers service would return to normal today.
CP Rail expects freight service will return to full capacity 48 hours after the wheels start turning, said spokesman Ed Greenberg, although clearing the backlog is more difficult to assess.
"We have lost nine days of loading," Raitt told an emergency debate in the upper chamber Thursday, where she was making a last pitch to speed through the legislation.
By way of illustration, Raitt said there were six ships in the port of Vancouver awaiting overseas grain shipments, and another eight ships were on their way to Vancouver. Each ship requires half a day to load.
"Even when the trains do start rolling it will take weeks for the backlog to clear and customers don't forget this," said Raitt.
The bill sends the labour dispute to a government-appointed arbitrator, who has 90 days to impose a deal on the two sides -- unless they can negotiate one themselves in the interim.
The Harper government has been both lauded and criticized for swiftly ending the labour disruption.
But Thursday's emergency committee-of-the-whole in the Senate -- the only parliamentary body to hear witnesses on the contentious back-to-work bill -- offered several surprises.
"This bill is fair. It is a fair bill. It gives us an option or a chance to perhaps get a good deal," Phil Benson, a lobbyist representing the Teamsters Canada union, told the Senate.
But Benson said previous heavy-handed back-to-work bills by the Tory government that favoured Air Canada and Canada Post management led CP Rail to bargain in bad faith, fully expecting to get the same soft treatment.
"I firmly believe if that elephant hadn't been in the room -- the previous back-to-work laws -- we wouldn't be here. I really believe we would have had a deal," said Benson.
Conservative Senator Hugh Segal agreed, although he framed the issue more broadly as a long-standing pattern of back-to-work bills by successive governments, Liberal and Tory.
Segal asked Raitt whether her legislation would "further feed the pattern that there is no real need for either side to give or bend or reach or stretch to achieve a negotiated settlement" because they know the government will ultimately step in.
Raitt called the repeated precedents "troubling."
"Being in government, you have to make tough decisions," she added.
Raitt said companies and unions should agree to arbitration of their own making, rather than leave it to Ottawa to intervene.
Pensions appear to be at the heart of the CP Rail dispute.
CP's Peter Edwards testified the company has poured $1.9 billion over the past three years into solvency deficits in the pension fund, with no end in sight. He noted the pension plan tops out at $93,000 a year for an engineer, compared with $60,000 for a CN engineer. Benson said no CP engineer had ever reached the pension cap -- although management employees do and their pension is not on the table.
-- The Canadian Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 1, 2012 A19
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