Prompted by the Canada Post strike that has left Canadians curiously unperturbed, one of Canada’s most august Catholic voices is calling for a rethink of public sector strikes in general.

“The government should legislate and enforce a fair return to work, and the whole concept of strikes in the public service, which has been a colossal and misguided failure, should be reconsidered,” Conrad Black writes in this week’s issue of the Epoch Times.

Black bashers, peering down from their ideological perches, may discredit the former press baron’s call as being another instance of his purported insatiable appetite for oppressing the working class. Sharp-eyed readers with vigorous memories might also see the irony of it appearing in a publication that had its own grievance with unionized postal workers refusing to deliver the newspaper because of its fervent anti-China, anti-communist editorial line.

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Yet historian that Black is, the founder of the National Post and erstwhile owner of most major metropolitan newspapers in Canada as well as the Chicago Sun Times and London’s Daily Telegraph makes a compelling point that only relatively recently did Canada begin to tolerate job action by public service workers.

Reaching back with perhaps more than a tinge of nostalgia to the glory days of Catholic Quebec under Premier Maurice Duplessis, he cites Le Chef’s maxim: “The right to strike against the public interest does not exist.” The edict carried political clout through the 1960s when  Duplessis’ successor, Premier Daniel Johnson, gave striking Montreal schoolteachers 48 hours to get back to class or their union would be decertified, its assets handed to the Quebec government, and syndical officers arrested or jailed. As late as 1978, Black notes, that embodiment of Liberal liberality, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, jailed the Canadian Union of Postal Workers boss, Jean Claude Parrot, for two months for defying back to work legislation.

“The principle is that strikes in the public sector are bad. The employees involved must be treated fairly. But just as teachers’ strikes are… against the public interest and constitute an act of blackmail against parents… postal strikes are, and always have been an affront to the whole country,” Black writes.

Agree or disagree with the principle claimed, the “affront” appears to be one most Canadians are handling by turning the digital cheek. Of course, there has been disruption. At The Catholic Register, we were forced to direct readers of last week’s issue to our digital edition because the abrupt Nov. 15 mass walkout left us unable to properly distribute the newsprint version. Thankfully, our customers have been fully understanding, and we’ve restored at least partial distribution for this week. 

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As is doubtless the case for businesses across the country, our cheques (receivable and payable) are “in the mail” that’s going nowhere. Still, the overwhelming dominance of digital connectedness makes possible carrying on relatively smoothly. 

That affords the equanimity to question Black’s premise that the public sector has no business on the picket line.

Grounds for finding him in error have nothing to do with the ridiculous caricature of him as a recidivist employee abuser. Staff at his Canadian newspapers, and doubtless elsewhere, were treated with a respect and encouragement of journalistic rigour (not to mention healthy paycheques) unrivalled in the industry. The staff of the Calgary Herald discovered this to their dismay only at the end of the bitter 1999 strike foisted on them by cretinous union ideologues who led them out the door and then abandoned them on the picket line after a few months for less than a mess of printer’s ink.

Where his take goes awry is in its contradiction of Catholic social teaching, which has affirmed since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 that workers have the right to bargain from a position of peaceful strength for an improvement of their conditions. 

Going forward from that, workers, in the widest possible array of vocations, must have the right to withhold what is of most value both to their employers and to themselves: that is, their labour. 

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Flatly: what else do they have?

If there is a reconsideration of removing  such a fundamental human right from public sector workers, it must be based on the crucial distinction between inconvenience and endangerment. The lack of perturbation occasioned by the current postal strike indicates there are strikes that don’t even rise to the level of tiresomeness, which would hardly justify a return to full-bore Duplessism.