The federal government blew it on this one!

​Air Canada’s 10,000 flight attendants were in a showdown with the Carney government and the federal government blinked.

The gutsy Air Canada flight attendants, who refused to end their strike without a fair settlement of their demand for pay for the full hours they work each day on the job, have reached a tentative agreement with the airline.

Federal “Jobs Minister” Patty Hajdu, not new to the cabinet table having been Minister Responsible for Indigenous Services in the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, incredibly took the “hear no evil, see no evil” approach by launching a probe into allegations of unpaid work in the airline sector.

What planet has Hajdu been living on? The flight attendants, 70 per cent of the them female, have long been protesting that they are only paid for the hours they are on board an aircraft, not the hours when they are on the ground preparing to fly, or after a plane has landed and has stopped moving.

While Canada’s next largest airline, WestJet does not provide pay for groundwork the issue is expected to be a key one for its flight attendants when their current collective agreement expires at the end of this year.

Elsewhere in North America, Delta Air Lines, which is not unionized, does pay partial wages for groundwork. Several European airlines also provide pay for flight attendants’ work on the ground.

The federal government used the contentious Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code which gives the Minister the power to order the end of a work stoppage to keep or secure labour peace. Over the past year, the government has used 107 to order unionized employees back to work at ports, rail yards, and, at Canada Post. The customary method to require workers to go back to their job has been through an act of Parliament, which has much more authority than one minister imposing a back-to-work order.

Prime Minster Mark Carney is not blameless in the current dispute. The structure of his cabinet, with a few Super Ministers, and then blurred responsibilities for more junior ministers has not helped the situation. For instance, Hajdu is responsible for Jobs and Families, but the word “Labour“ does not appear in her title.

If she were performing a clear Labour role in invoking Section 107 she would not have said “now is not the time to take risks with our economy.” Under clear cabinet responsibilities, she would have left those concerns for other ministers with clear responsibilities for the economy.

Carney has said it is important that Flight Attendants be paid equitably. He said the attendants and Air Canada itself, stated they were at an impasse. “That’s their judgment not my judgment.”

Does this mean there was no consultation with the Prime Minister or his office before Article 107 was invoked? That seems very unlikely. In the political world it’s all hands-on-deck when there is a crisis as important as this one to deal with.

The good news for inconvenienced travellers is that tentative agreement has now been reached between the company and the flight attendants.

“The strike has ended,” the CUPE union posted online. This can be seen as a negotiating tactic on the part of the union and angry passengers, to keep the pressure on Air Canada and the government.

Nonetheless, an ugly situation appears to be wending its way to a resolution, with the gradual resumption of flights. Next time, this government will very likely recall Parliament to deal with this type of dispute.

Once bitten, twice shy.