Air Canada maintenance workers voted — then the ballots were ordered destroyed

[lupin]

I want to tell you a story.

It starts with a vote and ends with an order to shred the ballots before anyone reads them. Everything in between should make you uncomfortable — not because it’s complicated, but because it isn’t.

I work on the maintenance side at Air Canada. I am one of roughly 2,250 TechOps employees — Aircraft Maintenance Engineers, maintenance technicians, licensed tradespeople — who keep this airline’s fleet airworthy. We share a bargaining unit with about 11,500 other workers: ramp, cargo, airport operations, logistics. They are good people doing important work. But they are not doing our work, and they do not carry our licences, and they do not face our regulatory exposure. And they outnumber us roughly five to one.

That gap matters more than it sounds.
I’ll come back to it.

How we got here
This did not start in 2025. Maintenance workers at Air Canada have been trying to solve the same representation problem for over 20 years. The attempts have taken different forms over time — different groups, different filings, different legal routes — but the underlying issue has remained the same: a licensed maintenance group trying to get representation that actually reflects its work.

There was a Canadian Aircraft Maintenance Association attempt in 2005. AMFA — the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, the craft union that already represents maintenance workers at WestJet, Jazz, and several other carriers — also made an earlier certification attempt that ran into a procedural timing issue. By the time AMFA filed again in January 2025, this was not a new problem. It was the latest chapter in a representation fight that had been building for years.

What felt different this time was the weight behind it — years of contracts ratified by the larger group over our objections, years of watching our specific needs get lost at the table, and more recently, the elimination of the two-table bargaining system that had at least acknowledged, in practice, that maintenance and operations were not identical.

That structure was dismantled in 2024, while the AMFA campaign was already underway. What replaced it was an advisory committee. As of May 15, 2026, that committee had not sat at a single bargaining session with the employer.

The application went in.
We waited.

The vote

In May 2025, the Canada Industrial Relations Board granted the application. The Board found that maintenance employees had a legitimate case for separate representation. A vote was ordered.

This was not a few people making noise. Before the vote was ever held, AMFA had already filed membership evidence with the Board and argued that support inside Technical Services was overwhelming. Support for change inside maintenance was not theoretical; it was visible in the cards, the petitions and the willingness of workers to put their names behind it.

Then, in late May 2025, we voted.

Over 2,000 of us.

Ninety-two point one five percent of eligible voters showed up.
I was one of them. You cast your ballot, you walk out, and you think: finally, we found a way to get proper representation.

What the IAMAW did next

The IAMAW’s response was immediate and it came on multiple fronts.

The union filed for judicial review at the Federal Court of Appeal, requested a stay — asking the court to prevent the results from ever being published — and simultaneously filed for reconsideration at the CIRB itself. The Board ordered the ballot results sealed. They have never been read by anyone.

Now here is the part that deserves its own paragraph.

Every dollar of that legal fight — every filing, every motion, every lawyer’s hour spent arguing that our vote shouldn’t count — was paid for with our union dues. Not partly. Entirely. Maintenance workers’ dues funded the full legal campaign mounted against maintenance workers’ right to choose their own representation. We paid for our own defeat.

AMFA tried to have those dues placed into a trust while the process played out, to stop exactly that from happening. That effort was overturned.

Think about what that means: it is as if someone reached into your pocket, took your money, and used it to hire a lawyer to argue against you in court. Except in this case, it was perfectly legal, and it went on for over a year.

November 2025

When the Board originally granted the certification application in May, it said it would publish its full written rationale at a later date. That date came in November 2025 — six months after the vote. Hundreds of pages explaining, in careful legal language, why maintenance employees formed a distinct community of interest. Why the existing structure had failed to adequately represent the specific needs of a licensed, regulated trade group. Why separate bargaining was warranted.
Hundreds of pages saying: these workers have a point.
I read it. Most of us did.
For the first time in a long time, it felt like someone in an official capacity actually understood what we had been saying for years.
That feeling did not last long.

Reconsideration

The reconsideration process brought in interveners — outside parties with a stake in the outcome.
The Canadian Labour Congress. Unifor. FETCO, the federally regulated employers’ association.
All of them opposing fragmentation.

The maintenance workers whose votes were sitting in a sealed box were not interveners. We were the subject of the proceeding.

On May 6, 2026, the reconsideration panel issued its decision. The original Board ruling was overturned. The certification application was dismissed. Among the reasons cited was a fear of contagion — the concern that allowing maintenance workers at Air Canada to form a separate bargaining unit might encourage similar applications elsewhere in federally regulated industries. The stability of the broader labour relations system, in other words, was considered a sufficient reason to keep a minority group locked inside a structure that a previous panel had already found was not working for them.

What makes that harder to swallow is that IAMAW already represents maintenance and airport workers separately elsewhere. At Air Transat, IAMAW administers separate bargaining units for maintenance workers and airport operations employees. So the problem cannot simply be that maintenance-only bargaining units are unworkable. IAMAW already works with that structure when it remains the certified representative. The issue only becomes an existential threat when the maintenance workers are trying to leave IAMAW altogether.

And then the panel ordered every sealed ballot destroyed within 30 days.

The reconsideration panel also concluded, for the record, that maintenance employees have meaningful access to collective bargaining.

Four months earlier, a completely separate CIRB panel had found that the IAMAW breached its duty of fair representation to those same maintenance employees — describing the union’s attitude toward their concerns as reflecting a “non-caring attitude.”
The reconsideration panel was aware of that finding. It chose not to address the contradiction.
When a tribunal tells you simultaneously that your union failed you and that you are adequately represented, and then orders the ballots that might have settled the question destroyed, you are not dealing with an oversight.

You are dealing with a conclusion in search of a rationale.

About the panel’s chair

There is a question about the reconsideration panel’s chair that is now before the Federal Court of Appeal, and it is not a small one.
She is a former Air Canada legal counsel — both in-house and in private practice — appointed to the CIRB by the federal Liberal government. She is not a stranger to controversy on exactly this point.
Eight months before the maintenance reconsideration decision, she was asked by CUPE to recuse herself from presiding over the Air Canada flight attendants’ labour dispute, on the grounds that her lengthy and close ties to Air Canada as legal counsel created an apprehension of bias. She refused. She ruled in Air Canada’s favour and ordered the strike ended. CUPE called it, at the time, “an almost unthinkable display of conflict of interest.”

That was August 2025 — a different union, a different dispute, the same person, the same pattern.
In the maintenance reconsideration, she authored a decision that cited a case in which she had personally appeared as counsel for Air Canada. Once again, no disclosure was made at any point in the process.Whether that constitutes a disqualifying conflict is one of the grounds in AMFA’s judicial review application now before the Federal Court of Appeal.

Where it stands now

Maintenance workers in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver have been out protesting. AMFA has asked the Federal Court of Appeal to prevent the ballots from being destroyed until the judicial review is completed.
Whether the ballots still exist at this moment, I genuinely do not know.
What I know is that the destruction order stands, the clock is running, and the court is the last stop.

Why this should matter to you

If you fly this airline, the people who sign off on the aircraft you board hold Transport Canada licences.
Those licences are personal.
The liability is personal.

When an AME puts their name on a maintenance release, they are staking their certification — and in serious cases, their freedom — on that aircraft being airworthy.
That is not a figure of speech.

That regulatory reality creates bargaining priorities that are specific to our trade. A majority vote ratifies a contract that works well enough for the majority. What happens to the minority is a different question, and in our case, the answer has consistently been: not much.

The trap

Inside our bargaining unit, maintenance workers are outnumbered roughly five to one.
Every contract gets ratified because the larger group has the votes to ratify it. The CIRB reads that as evidence the structure works. What it actually means is that the structure works for the majority — which is a different thing entirely.

And if you are wondering whether maintenance workers can simply decertify the IAMAW and choose someone else — welcome to the trap.

Decertification requires majority support across the entire bargaining unit. The same majority that keeps ratifying contracts gets to decide whether maintenance is allowed to leave. They will not.
So the door in is also the door out, and it is controlled by the people with no particular reason to open it.
Splitting the bargaining unit was the one legitimate procedural opening that existed. It was a separate route to proper representation that did not require the entire bargaining unit to vote on whether maintenance should be allowed to leave.
Maintenance workers used that route.

Over 2,000 of us showed up.
And the CIRB shut that route down. Now maintenance workers are being treated less like members with agency and more like prisoners inside a union structure they cannot realistically change.

A federal tribunal has ordered the evidence destroyed.

Voiceless by design

There is one more layer to this, and it matters.
In 2024 and into 2025, maintenance workers were systematically removed from positions within the union’s own structure. At the local level and on shop committees — including in Montreal, where the shop committee was cleared of maintenance workers entirely — the IAMAW’s internal charge and discipline process was used.
People were run through it. Those who were not considered sufficiently aligned with the union’s direction lost their positions.
Think of it the way you would think of any operation designed to eliminate dissent and consolidate control: the people in charge identified the voices that complicated things, and they removed them.

One by one, until the room only said what it was supposed to say.
The result is that maintenance workers now have virtually no voice inside the structure that is actively negotiating our next contract — while paying the dues that funded the year-long legal fight against our right to choose adequate representation according to our own wishes.

Two thousand people voted.
Nobody knows what they said.
Democracy dies in darkness, and in this case the darkness is literal: sealed ballots, locked away from the workers who cast them, then ordered destroyed before their voices can ever be heard.

If the destruction order survives, nobody ever will know what those workers said.

Thank you for voting.
Now please leave unseen.

[cdnavater]

Just curious, if the maintenance workers were to wildcat, would your dues be used to pay the fines the union faces for said wildcat?
I will also add, as a pilot, I have always thought this situation was complete bs, you should be represented by your own union!

[BTD]

Very well written and articulate.

If this is accurate, and I have no reason to think it isn’t. Perhaps an anonymous email to an investigative reporter?

[BTD]

Very well written and articulate.

If this is accurate, and I have no reason to think it isn’t. Perhaps an anonymous email to an investigative reporter?

[oneL]

Wow what a horrible situation. Godspeed

[digits_]

For a country with a constitutional right to strike a lot of actors are surely going through a lot of trouble to prevent and/or break unity.

Why is IAMAW so opposed to mechanics leaving? Just because they would be missing out on dues?

Note that the economic situation has never been so good for AMEs as today, if one would like to organize some creative labour action which could endanger one's employment

[goingnowherefast]

https://cirb-ccri.gc.ca/en/about-appeal ... -duty-fair

Labour Relations - Duty of Fair Representation

[cdnavater]

https://cirb-ccri.gc.ca/en/about-appeal ... -duty-fair

Labour Relations - Duty of Fair Representation

Looks like they already tried that,
“Four months earlier, a completely separate CIRB panel had found that the IAMAW breached its duty of fair representation to those same maintenance employees — describing the union’s attitude toward their concerns as reflecting a “non-caring attitude.”
The reconsideration panel was aware of that finding. It chose not to address the contradiction.
When a tribunal tells you simultaneously that your union failed you and that you are adequately represented, and then orders the ballots that might have settled the question destroyed, you are not dealing with an oversight”

[lupin]

Very well written and articulate.

If this is accurate, and I have no reason to think it isn’t. Perhaps an anonymous email to an investigative reporter?

These sort of issues don't generate much interest at the journalist level. The Media is looking for more salient articles.

[lupin]

https://cirb-ccri.gc.ca/en/about-appeal ... -duty-fair

Labour Relations - Duty of Fair Representation

These complaints at the CIRB are prescriptive, not punitive.
The Board is mainly concerned with whether employees received fair representation and what should be done to correct deficiencies, not with punishing unions for misconduct in the way a court might award damages or penalties.

That distinction is important strategically because many workers instinctively think:
“the union violated its duty, therefore there should be punishment.”
But the CIRB framework is usually much more:
-administrative,
-remedial,
-and future-oriented.

With past section 37 complaints where the union was found to be at fault, the CIRB highlights the issue, has the union post the reprimand on it's website and that is the end of the process. No follow up is done, no fines are given and that is exactly where apathy towards the system is born.

[flyingcanuck]

Very well written and articulate.

If this is accurate, and I have no reason to think it isn’t. Perhaps an anonymous email to an investigative reporter?

It was written with AI lol.. not saying its made up but this person didnt write it themselves.