For more than two months, 49 security workers at the Bank of Canada have been on strike. They belong to PSAC and walked out on June 23 to protect their benefits and bargain for a fair deal.
These are the workers who keep our central bank secure. They are not asking for much. Fairness. But mostly, they want to keep what they already have.
The Bank has pushed scheduling and overtime concessions that would cut earnings their families count on. It proposed trimming the maternity leave top-up by a week. The seven officers in Montreal are paid less than their Ottawa counterparts while doing the same work. Add it up: stable schedules, wages that keep up with costs, and basic respect from one of the most powerful institutions in the country.
It is time for politicians to stand up, enforce their own anti-scab law, end the Bank’s use of replacement workers, and get both sides back to the bargaining table.
Instead of bargaining, the Bank turned to replacement workers. Scabs. Something that is supposed to be impossible in Canada.
The labour movement fought for decades to win this law, and in June 2025 it came into force. It bans federally regulated employers from using replacement workers during a strike or lockout, with fines up to $100,000 a day. The law exists because the NDP made it a condition of its support for the minority Liberal government. Every party in the House backed it, and not a single MP opposed it.
So what did the Bank do? It brought in scabs, not once but twice in 67 days. In early July, the Canada Industrial Relations Board ordered the Bank to stop. The ruling was blunt: replacement workers broke the law, and the Bank had 48 hours to end it.
According to media reports and the union, the Bank signed a contract with Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations. Yes, that Pinkerton, a name tied to strikebreaking for more than a century. That was after it was ordered to stop using GardaWorld contractors.
The law allows exceptions for real threats to safety or property, but the CIRB heard that argument and ruled against the Bank. Two rounds of bringing in scabs is a pattern, and it tells every federally regulated employer that this law has no teeth.
PSAC has filed a fourth unfair labour practice complaint, alleging that the Bank ignored another Board order and continued to use replacement workers anyway. If you ask me, the Bank is not testing the law. It is defying it.
Politicians need to stand up: enforce the law Parliament passed, end the replacement workers, and get these workers back to a fair bargaining table.
A law that is not enforced is just words on paper. If the Bank of Canada, of all employers, can ignore this one, then every collective agreement in the federal sector is weaker for it.
Forty-nine workers on a picket line are holding the Bank of Canada to account. The least Ottawa can do is hold the Bank to the law, a law that every party in the House backed unanimously, with no votes against it. It is time for our MPs to stand up and make sure the laws they put in place are upheld.
