Ten thousand flight attendants walked off the job at Air Canada, and for a day, the country glimpsed what it looks like when ordinary people defy both their employer and their government. The wildcat strike was illegal. It was also profoundly Canadian.

We have, after all, been here before.

In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, one in three Canadian trade union members took part in a strike. There were two main reasons: the rapid industrialization of Canada created deep economic tensions, and those tensions were made worse by the government’s hostile, combative approach to organized labour. Strikes spread through every industrial town large and small. Munitions plants sat idle, and workers filled the streets with pickets and parades demanding that their elected unions be recognized and allowed to bargain with their bosses. The typical Canadian supported the war but also asked the critical question: how could our government claim to be fighting for democracy abroad while denying it to us at home? Placards and newspaper ads then might have spoken for today, reading “Democracy? Yes — for the rich. What about us?”

The wartime strike wave forced a reckoning. Out of that turmoil came Privy Council Order 1003, the cornerstone of Canada’s industrial relations system. It required corporations to recognize unions and bargain in good faith. This was no gift to labour. Workers paid dearly, surrendering the ancient right to strike. The deal was clear: in exchange for the militant labour movement showing restraint, workers gained recognition and a collective bargaining system. Historians came to label post-war public policies like labour laws and new social programs, including housing and universal healthcare, the “Great Compromise.” 

The political and corporate elite hoped to turn “class struggle” into class snuggle.

That compromise underwrote Canada’s post-war prosperity. Yes, labour peace was purchased at the cost of worker militancy, but it delivered stability and, with it, rising wages, secure jobs, and the confidence that the next generation would live better than the last. Democracy was not confined to the ballot box; it had a place in the workplace.

Eighty-one years later, Mark Carney has upended the compromise that the greatest of generations built for us. In his very first major test as prime minister, he intervened in the Air Canada dispute not by compelling bargaining, but by relieving the company of its obligations to negotiate altogether. 

By invoking a little-known Section 107 loophole, the government acted unilaterally, setting a stark precedent: corporations need not negotiate, for the state will act as their enforcer.

For workers, the lesson was equally clear. If corporations are no longer required to follow the rules, why must unions adhere to the same rules? The flight attendants, in defying the law with their wildcat strike, did not break from the “Great Compromise,” but rather their militancy upheld its spirit — democracy belongs in the workplace, too.

The consequences of Carney’s choice are far-reaching. Despite the Prime Minister’s public statement, we are not returning to a familiar balance. We may be entering a new and unstable era. If our government reverts to the era of Mitchell Hepburn or William Lyon Mackenzie King, when our governments stood with employers, Canadian workers will also return to that era. Strikes will become more chaotic, less predictable, and increasingly extra-legal. The 1940s are not as distant as we like to think.

And make no mistake: the flight attendants were fighting against a key pillar of our nation. Air Canada is no ordinary company. It is emblematic of our country’s penchant for social corporatism. Air Canada and its shareholders get to enjoy the privileges of a near monopoly, propped up by billions in public subsidies. During the pandemic alone, it received almost $6 billion in government assistance. 

Air Canada’s executives sit at the highest tables of political influence — its former counsel now chairs the Canada Industrial Relations Board. When Air Canada’s CEO boasted that the company had planned all along to exploit a legal loophole with Carney’s connivance, he merely said aloud what many Canadians already suspected: the company embodies the unholy marriage of corporate privilege and political power.

This is why the strike resonated so strongly with the public. Canadians may not know the details of Order 1003, we may not even know exactly how much money Air Canada still owes taxpayers from the bailout (maybe it is $1.27 billion?). But, we do know what it is to live paycheque to paycheque. Michael Rousseau and Wesley Lesosky are not household names. But Canadians know what it feels like when executive pay soars while our own wages stagnate, when housing costs spiral while our savings shrink, and we know when a government that overrides our rights in the name of “stability” cannot be trusted to safeguard either prosperity or democracy. That’s why polls show even Liberal voters are uneasy: a majority acknowledge the intervention threatens Charter rights.

The larger irony is that Carney campaigned on being the steady hand. His “Elbows Up” slogan promised Canadians agency, unity, and stability. He cast the present as a “generational challenge” on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Mark Carney has forgotten the true generational challenge of Canada’s own past: how to bind capital to democracy, how to ensure that economic transformation is anchored in fairness. 

The past that Carney calls back was not built on corporate prerogative but on a compromise with workers. By discarding Canada’s “Great Compromise,” Carney undermines the very stability he claims to want to advance.

Canadian history ought not exist only in the hallways of universities or the mouths of demagogues. It is the memory of how we arrived here, and what we risk losing. The historian Tony Judt once observed that “thanks to half a century of prosperity and safety, we in the West have forgotten the political and social traumas of mass insecurity.” We have forgotten that mass insecurity is dangerous — not just for workers, but for democracy itself.

That forgetting is perilous. For Canadians today, insecurity is no abstraction. Wages lag, rents rise, and most households live one bill away from crisis. The more governments intervene to protect corporations rather than people, the more fragile our democracy becomes. Social contracts do not dissolve overnight. But in moments like this, when workers walk off the job, and the state tells them their rights no longer matter, we can feel the fabric of democracy fray as it did in the interwar years. We can see the poverty in our streets. We can hear the rise of a fascist right.

Carney promised a steady hand. But steadiness without fairness is not stability: it is repression. “Elbows Up” turned out to be a slogan without substance. The true lesson of our history is that Canada thrived when we extended democracy beyond Parliament and into the workplace, when we treated unions not as threats but as essential partners, and when we recognized working-class Canadians as builders of national prosperity.

If our leaders will not remember that history, workers will. The flight attendants have reminded us of a truth as old as Canada’s wartime strikes: when the system refuses fairness, defiance is democracy.

Jen Hassum is executive director of the Broadbent Institute.