Mediation between Yellowknife and union starts today despite strike, lockout notices

The City of Yellowknife and the Public Service Alliance of Canada both say they're "optimistic" they'll reach a deal on the collective agreement for workers — and both say they're just following obligations by issuing strike and lockout notices to each other.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) North delivered a notice to the city just after midnight on Sunday that its workers would go on strike as of Wednesday if a deal isn't reached. The city followed that up with a notice of its own declaring it would lock workers out Wednesday if a deal isn't reached.

Despite that, mediation between the two parties is set to resume Monday afternoon and Tuesday.

Sheila Bassi-Kellett, Yellowknife's city manager, said Monday that if they need more time to reach an agreement, the two parties could both agree to drop their strike and lockout notices.

"We're very hopeful about the discussions that are going on today and tomorrow," she said.

Strike vs. lockout

If workers strike on Wednesday, the workers themselves would decide which services to stop delivering and when to walk off the job. It wouldn't be a complete work stoppage, said Lorraine Rousseau, the regional executive vice-president for PSAC North, and essential services would still be delivered.

If the city locks workers out instead, that puts the ball in the city's court for which services get shut down, instead of running facilities and programs without knowing whether employees would show up for work. Bassi-Kellett said essential services would remain in that case as well.

Monday's mediation comes after negotiations broke down in December 2022, roughly a year after the previous collective agreement expired. Tensions have escalated since then, with the union accusing the city of negotiating in bad faith.

Though much of the bargaining is confidential, wage increases for city staff continue to be a sticking point.

Bassi-Kellett said the city has budgeted for a two per cent increase across the board, while Rousseau said the union believes there's enough of a buffer built into the budget for an increase closer to inflation.

The mediation comes after more than a year without a collective agreement.

Why the notices?

Rousseau said the strike notice PSAC gave to the city was a requirement in order for the potential strike to be legal, in case mediation fails.

She said from the union's point of view, the city's subsequent lockout notice is "another intimidation tactic."

"I believe they did that in almost a knee-jerk reaction and as a sign of force: 'You want to try and strike? Well, we're going to lock you out,'" she said Monday morning.

Bassi-Kellett said the reasoning behind the lockout notice was because the city wanted to give residents as much certainty as possible of what services would be disrupted.

She added the city was "disappointed" to receive the union's notice of strike, but declined to say who ultimately made the decision to issue a lockout notice, saying that's confidential.

"When we received that letter giving notice that strike action will take place, we had to react to that and we had to consider a path forward," she said.

"Any suggestion that says the city's notice is substantially different than what the union did is really not accurate at all."

Bassi-Kellett said the city had to consider what could happen if workers went on strike: "Would there be a full strike? Would there be rolling walkouts? Would different staff in different departments walk out at different times? We don't have any idea of what strike action would look like, and we've had to plan for that because we were served this notice in writing," she said.

She added the city will be "as creative as we can" at the bargaining table, but noted there's no room in the budget to move on wages — there aren't "bags and bags of money sitting that's tucked away."

"We're at the max," she said.