Only a few hours after a strike began September 8 involving about 350 laboratory technicians and technologists at the blood-testing company Dynacare, Manitoba New Democratic Party (NDP) Premier Wab Kinew sent government lawyers to the provincial Labour Board to obtain a strike-breaking back-to-work order.
Shortly thereafter, the board issued an interim order compelling the workers to resume full services while it reviewed whether their work should be classified as “essential,” thereby eliminating their ability to strike.
The Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals (MAHCP) bureaucracy quickly bowed to the anti-worker diktat and instructed the strikers to disband their picket lines and return to work the following day.
Kinew’s intervention places Manitoba’s ostensibly “pro-worker” NDP government squarely within the cross-Canada assault on the right to strike.
The federal NDP propped up Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberal government as it arrogated to itself sweeping new powers to illegalize strikes through a concocted reinterpretation of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code. Trudeau’s government used those powers against rail, port and postal workers, and the Carney Liberal government has continued down the same path.
The NDP and trade union bureaucracy are now closely aligned with Carney through the nationalist “Team Canada” campaign, which demands that workers subordinate their interests to the competitiveness and geopolitical ambitions of Canadian imperialism. At the same time, the Carney government has launched a broader review of the Canada Labour Code, including the legal framework governing strikes and collective bargaining.
Kinew’s strikebreaking against the Dynacare workers exposes the NDP’s complaints about the federal Liberals’ use of Section 107 as a fraud. Their objections amount to hypocritical bleating from a party that helped create the political conditions for these powers to be used and whose closest allies in the union bureaucracy fear that naked state suppression of strikes will discredit the collective bargaining system, provoke worker rebellion and undermine the privileges that come from having a “seat at the table” and policing the class struggle.
The move by Kinew is no aberration. Since its founding in 1961, the NDP has repeatedly sought to prove itself a “responsible” instrument of government that can be trusted to uphold the interests of big business and defend the Canadian state. Federal NDP leaders have propped up Liberal governments whenever required, while provincial NDP governments, from Roy Romanow in Saskatchewan and Bob Rae in Ontario to Gary Doer in Manitoba, have imposed austerity and enforced the demands of capital.
Kinew came to power pledging to fix Manitoba’s crumbling healthcare system, but his government has imposed strict budgetary and wage restraint on the very workers that system depends upon. In 2024, its year-long suspension of the provincial fuel tax cost the treasury an estimated $340 million in revenue. Kinew subsequently announced spending restraint aimed at keeping annual expenditure growth below the rate required to meet inflation, population growth and the mounting needs of the healthcare system.
His government has at the same time embraced the Canadian ruling class’s drive for rearmament and resource extraction. Kinew has pressed Ottawa to accelerate military spending and promoted Manitoba as “the Costco of critical minerals,” placing the province’s resources at the disposal of Canadian big business and Ottawa’s military-strategic ambitions.
The implications for workers were evident in October 2024, when the CUPE and MGEU bureaucracies called off a pending strike by 25,000 healthcare support workers after reaching a tentative agreement with the province. A CUPE survey of more than 5,000 support workers found that about one in 16 had used food banks or charity and one in nine had faced housing insecurity. Kinew welcomed the deal while making clear that his government would not provide the wage increases needed to reverse years of declining real incomes.
His intervention against the Dynacare technicians is a further development of this record.
The technicians have been without a collective agreement since March 31. According to MAHCP, they are paid between 20 and 50 percent less than technicians doing comparable work in public laboratories. Dynacare offered wage increases that would still leave its employees significantly behind their counterparts in the public sector.
In attempting to justify his strikebreaking operation, Kinew claimed that the technicians were too important to the functioning of the health system to be allowed to strike. Yet months before the walkout, the union and Dynacare had agreed that an essential-services agreement was unnecessary. The province itself had also been preparing for the strike.
Shared Health announced before the walkout that Manitoba’s health system was prepared for the labour disruption and that regional health authorities, Shared Health, CancerCare Manitoba and the provincial government had been working to ensure continuity of essential laboratory services. Emergency and time-sensitive diagnostic testing would continue, with non-urgent testing delayed where medically safe.
The last-minute intervention therefore had the character of an ambush. Only once the workers had actually exercised their right to strike did the NDP government rush to the Labour Board to demand that they be ordered back on the job.
After the technicians returned to work, and amid accusations of hypocrisy, Kinew launched into damage control. “Dynacare sucks,” he told reporters, before suggesting that unless the company cleaned up its “mess,” there were “off-ramps” for the government to end its contract with the company.
This bluster cannot conceal the substance of what took place. Faced with a struggle between workers demanding wage increases and a major private healthcare corporation, Kinew’s government intervened to disarm the workers and strengthen management’s hand. Nor is Dynacare some marginal local operator against which Kinew is powerless to act.
Dynacare is owned by Labcorp, formally Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, a major US-based clinical laboratory company with operations across North America and internationally. The struggle of Dynacare workers therefore immediately poses the need to reject the nationalism promoted by the NDP and union bureaucracy and turn to workers across the Canada-US border, including Labcorp workers in the United States, who confront the same drive for lower labour costs, intensified workloads and corporate profit.
Kinew’s action also underscores the real attitude of the NDP toward the right to strike. In 2024, he supported the Trudeau government’s intervention against workers at CN and CPKC, insisting that the railways had to resume operations in the interests of the economy. Now his own government has used the provincial labour-relations apparatus to suppress a strike directly.
Kinew came to office promising the unions more favourable terms within the collective bargaining system, including reversing some Conservative attacks on union certification. But the state-regulated bargaining framework remains designed to contain the class struggle within legally prescribed channels. Manitoba law provides for compulsory arbitration after 60 days of a strike or lockout, ensuring that even a prolonged struggle can ultimately be taken out of workers’ hands. The union apparatus accepts this framework because its privileges depend upon policing it.
The experience of the Dynacare workers must be viewed alongside the struggles of rail workers, dockworkers, postal workers and Air Canada flight attendants. In each case, workers have encountered a state apparatus increasingly prepared to suspend the right to strike when corporate profits, supply chains or broader ruling-class interests are threatened.
Workers cannot defend their interests by appealing to the NDP, the Liberals or the union bureaucracy to administer this system more fairly. Dynacare workers should organize independently through rank-and-file committees and appeal to healthcare workers across Manitoba and Canada for active support.
Above all, their struggle must cross the border. The ownership of Dynacare by Labcorp demonstrates in concrete form that the corporations workers confront operate internationally. Workers must respond in the same way, opposing “Team Canada” nationalism and uniting with their class brothers and sisters in the United States and internationally against the corporations, governments and union bureaucracies that seek to subordinate their lives and livelihoods to profit.
Subscribe to the IWA-RFC Newsletter
Get email updates on workers’ struggles and a global perspective from the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Read more
- Canada’s Liberal government preparing massive onslaught on worker rights with revision of Labour Code
- The intensifying US-Canada trade war: A product and accelerant of inter-imperialist conflict
- CUPE and MGEU nix Manitoba healthcare support workers strike after announcing last-minute tentative agreement
- “Left populist” Avi Lewis wins race to lead Canada’s social-democratic NDP