Federal Supply Chain Regulatory Review Consulation

The federal government should work to raise and standardize labour regulations to the hightest level across the country. National transport companies are forced by competition to move to lower-regulatory regimes by shifting operations to (usually) be within provincial boundaries. This increases fragmentation of the transport system, but also lowers the quality of the work environment. This fragmentation increases the servicing cost of organizing and enforcing collective agreements on worker unions and undermines the maintenance of labour standards in the transport sector.

The federal government should work with provinces to ensure that Canadian Constitutional guarantees and ILO Conventions on the right to strike and freely negotiate collective agreements are upheld in all jurisdictions. This means ensuring that there is sustained clear opposition to requests for undermining labour rights in ports, transport nodes, and rail/road/marine routes.

Labour unions and workers must be able to establish safe work environments and fair pay through collective bargaining in the transport sector to ensure the sector can attract high-quality labour. The best way to do this is through free collective bargaining.

Any unclear messaging from governments on upholding the right to bargain freely or the right to strike creates confusion and expectations by employers that they are able to push for limits on these Constitutionally protected rights.

Supply chains include the movement of workers and goods. Regulations should be established to ensure transit and passenger rail services continue to see investment to ensure sustainable worker access to transport infrastructure. The federal government should work with provinces and companies to continue to build capacity to reach new mining projects in the North where rail is the main, cheapest, and sometimes only transport route. These investments should be leveraged by the federal government to ensure regular public passenger rail access to Northern communities, including indigenous communities.

Research, data collection, and analysis on supply chains collected through Transport Canada needs to be expanded and shared freely with communities, the public, and companies.

Regulations need to be established and harmonized with provinces overseeing rail data collection using new technologies. Regulation needs to be adopted by the government on the installation, maintenance and data processes of technologies like wayside detectors. Recommendations from the investigation into the East Palestine disaster in the USA should be examined for implementation here in Canada. This includes working with workers and their unions on augmenting their work with data from safety related technology such as wayside detectors. Standardization of best practices in wayside detector research across companies will save lives, reduce the burden on companies on finding best practices, and reduce the cost of per-unit implementation.

Workers support the standardization of data collection and sharing on transport route options for shippers. Support for data sharing on movement, but also safety issues, should be expanded to better identify excess capacity for utilization, including road, rail, and marine routes.

National supply chain research for keeping the supply chain operational is essential and should be financially supported by the industry. Canada has specific challenges due to our geography, culture, weather, and unique impacts of climate change. It is important that this research happen in an independent research council focused on supporting the industry broadly. Research results should be available to all industry players to support decision making for investment in Canada.

The people of Canada cannot rely on individual (or even associations of specific) firms taking the lead on investing in research and development on the best options for implementing green technologies across the transport system. National research programs for greening transport and supply chain resiliency need to be expanded to examine the impacts of potential implementation of technologies that affect the industry as a whole. Standardized and sustainable implementation across the transport system is essential to support during this time of large shifts in technology.

Issues that should be included in standardization efforts are data on refuelling, costs of implementation, investment in infrastructure need to reach remote areas, and labour and skills needs. Research should be carried when sporadic implementation of new technologies is occurring in unprofitable geographies. Rural and Northern areas of the country, where new fuel/charging infrastructure will be more expensive to build, cannot be left lagging behind on greener transport infrastructure.

The federal government should be clearer on its principles guiding introduction of automation in the transport sector. For example, automated trucking fleets are still far from realizable in Canada, but industry incentives are strong in the attempt to reduce the number of workers or de-skill workers across the supply chain system. If left unregulated, the risk is high that it will result in rapid changing rates of implementation and failures of new technologies. Such shifts could cause extensive problems for labour market signals to potential workers and affect labour supply in the transportation system in the medium and longer terms.

Workers and their unions should be directly involved in government building understanding of the impact of technological change on the economics of the industry, necessary inputs to sustain new technology, safety, and employment.

Regulations supporting common minimum labour standards across all firms in the industry should be established. Such regulations should include investment in standardizing bathroom access for operators across all commercial transport systems and transit. Public investment in infrastructure is likely necessary to level-out competition between firms involved in delivery, transit, and transport for worker access to clean, safe, and functional washrooms.

In addition to workplace standards, the federal government should work with provinces to establish Safe Rates across the transport system. Safe Rates is a global call to set wage and work environment minimum standards so competition happens between firms in their ability to deliver services and not through their ability to drive wages down to unsafe levels.

An example of a broader negotiated labour standard is the BC Trucking minimum standards legislation that resulted from port disputes in that province. Additional asks for regulatory changes regarding trucking and training standards can be found in Unifor's submission to the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities on Anticipated Labour Shortages, October 21, 2022.

Regulations should be established using the best data possible for the needs of Canadians. Research on the needs of regulation in the industry should be supported by funded independent research organizations consulting with industry and unions. Canadian regulation should address safe and sustainable introduction of technologies in the transport sector.

An over-reliance on concepts such as "self-regulation" in the transport system are not serving Canadians or workers. Smarter regulation of the transport sector is necessary to balance-out the levels of deregulation reached in Canada.

The principle of augmentation of work should be promoted over the replacement of workers when it comes to automation in safety systems. Incentives exist for companies to use new technologies to attempt to reach the same "level" of safety through automation and technology instead of increasing safety through investment in technology.

The replacement of workers with automation for safety inspection in the current environment of deregulation and "self-regulation" will result in companies controlling when and where their safety systems operate. The temptation of "dialing back" inspection levels through automated inspection systems when freight are late will be too high. Without worker oversight and regulation through the principle of augmentation safety, and therefore resilience of our transport system, will decline.

Regulations should also keep up with leaders in industry regulation, such as the Pacific Coastal Collaborative or the Memorandum of Cooperation initiatives, to reduce carbon emissions from transport. However, the costs associated with shipping and port company compliance with greening Medium and Heavy Duty truck regulations should not be allowed to be downloaded to owner operators.

Timelines and costs of equipment purchasing and upgrades should be clearly established and shared across the industry. Greening the transport industry is beneficial to all Canadians, so the costs should not be paid for through reduction of income of workers in the industry.

Investment in common infrastructure such as changes in fuel and electric charging and other related new transport products should lead the direction of regulatory changes, not follow.

The following regulations need establishing or strengthening to support Canadian industries seeking to establish a supply of critical minerals and allow easy connection with Canadian producers, suppliers, and shipping.

1. Clear identification of which minerals are classified as "critical minerals".
2. Standardize collection and sharing of federal data on production, import, export, shipping, rates, and spot prices for production across the mining and transport sector.
3. Established with industry, federal expectations of production and standardization of recycled critical minerals from Canadian processing and for Canadian use.
4. Canadian regulation for critical mineral storage, shipping containers, their inspection, and maintenance.

The federal government should support Statistics Canada interacting with National Research Council assessments and industry groups for data collection and sharing at the federal level. Data from firms engaged in production, storage, and shipping should feed real-time data to support spot price determination should be included in this collaboration.

Data should include total costs for production, storage, shipping and should integrate with private sector trade data on Canadian critical minerals.

The federal government may want to support the establishment of their own robust data systems for monitoring Canadian import and export of critical minerals to compliment the results of the Critical Minerals Infrastructure Fund.

Recycling of critical minerals is going to be important in securing resilient supply chains of refined product.

Standardized labelling of quality of critical minerals from recycling process developed with industry using those inputs may be helpful in supporting the use and trade of those minerals.

A national inventory and reserve of certain critical minerals may be important to establish for national security-related uses. Such a knowledge of the levels of critical minerals accessible in the country or reserve of these inputs may help to smooth out sudden changes in price and support resilient supply chains.

Currently, there are low-levels of mid-stream processing and refining of critical minerals in Canada. China has also placed limits on access to the intellectual property of these process to Canadian firms. This points to the need for research and development support for Canadian firms through National Research Council industrial-level research on processing and refining.

Support for mid-stream processes may have to include public investment in building strategic capacity for mid-stream processing of Canadian critical minerals to lower financial barriers for refinement in Canada.

Similar to support for non-critical mineral extraction, refinement such as aluminum smelting, the focus should be on green, low carbon alternatives for processing resulting in a low-carbon product.

The federal government should directly support supply chain development of the chemical inputs for refining Canadian-specific deposits for lithium and other salts for battery production for vehicle and electrical grid-level storage.

As this new industry develops, it may be necessary for the federal and provincial governments to support the integration of industrial research, government investment program, private capital investment, and suspected labour and skill needs data.

This data should feed into re-training/re-skilling/up-skilling workers from industries experiencing layoffs caused by the transition to low-carbon energy. Principles of transition should be brought into labour development programs along with reforms of Employment Insurance to incorporate training supports, and recruitment for expected skilled trades.

Unifor's union training centres have shown how skills matching can work in practice and support a functional skilled trades labour market.

As battery and new energy technology needs result in scaling-up of Canadian production, it will be important to supplement the mining of inputs with the in-Canada recycling to sustain access for Canadian production in a circular critical mineral economy. The federal government should work with provinces to highlight benefits from supporting a circular economy in these and other materials. Some attempts at introducing recovery of minerals have started Ontario with amendments to the mining act.

The federal government should work with provinces to mandate novel recycling and tailings management practices that would improve the reprocessing and repurposing of both end-of-life products and mining wastes. Regulations should be developed that directly support the in-Canada recycling of these products and support secondary markets.

Canada should seek to maintain data and support production of inputs for refining, recycling, and production process. This includes oversight of the necessary chemical and energy inputs. This data would also support efficient markets in these inputs as demand shifts quickly with new production needs.