CN and CPKC employees moving towards a strike

May 02, 2024

The earliest a strike could occur is May 22

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Employees at two railway companies could strike later this month.

The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC) announced that 97.6 per cent of CN conductors, locomotive engineers and yard workers, and 99 per cent of the same employees at CPKC, voted in favour of moving forward with a strike.

And rail traffic controllers at CPKC voted 95.3 per cent in favour of a strike.

This means if the union and employers can’t come to an agreement, a strike could occur as early as May 22.

“CN and CPKC, the message is clear,” Paul Boucher, president of the TCRC said during a May 1 news conference in Ottawa. “Your employees have spoken.”

Any claims that the railway companies are proposing predictable work schedules are false, Boucher said.

A summary of CN’s April 11 offer to the TCRC indicates the organization is offering consistent schedules.

“Employees will know, in advance, the days they are at work and the days they are off – giving them more flexibility and work-life balance,” the document says. “Furthermore, they cannot be called to work during the scheduled days off at their home terminal.”

An example of a schedule would be five eight-hour workdays with two consecutive days off.

Boucher claimed the railway companies want to strip away articles that mitigate worker fatigue.

As of Nov. 25, 2024, the “Duty & Rest Period Rules” for railway companies and employees indicates and employee must have a minimum of 12 hours of rest at the home terminal, 10 hours of rest in an accommodation if the terminal is in a remote location, and 10 hours in an accommodation when not in a home terminal.

And eight of those hours must be undisturbed.

No information on CPKC’s offers is readily available, but the company insists its offers comply with the new rules.

“Both options provide significant benefits for our employees and fully comply with new Canadian regulatory requirements for rest. They do not in any way compromise safety. To say or suggest otherwise is false,” the organization said in a May 1 statement.

“The first offer provides significant pay increases made possible by a simplified time-based method of pay and improved work-life balance through schedule predictability and set days off. The second offer proposes competitive wage increases and maintains the status quo for the balance of the collective agreement, with one exception: addressing a single pay item at the away from home terminal to account for the new regulated rest regime in Canada.”

Canada’s ag industry has weighed in on the labour situation.

Grain Growers of Canada and its members are calling for an urgent resolution to the issue.

About 94 per cent of Canadian grain is transported by rail, with much of it headed for export markets.

Any supply chain disruptions would cause significant challenges, said Andre Harpe, chair of Grain Growers of Canada.

“A rail strike now is the last thing we need. We’re at a critical point in the seeding season, and any delay in shipping can directly affect our bottom line and cause substantial economic losses across the agricultural sector,” he said in a statement.

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.