OTTAWA — Canada’s two biggest railways and the union representing about 9,300 of their workers don’t agree on very much just now, except this: when you get right down to it, their services are not essential.

With strikes or lockouts looming at both railways, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference have all told the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) that it should rule that none of their work is so important to safety or health that it must continue even during a strike or lockout.

If the labour board agrees, that would allow total shutdowns of either network, or both of them. Teamsters members at both railways have authorized strikes and CN has publicly said that strikes or lockouts could come in mid- to late July.

Let’s double-check whether the companies and their workers are right about the unimportance of their services, Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan said in May. At his request, the board is looking at CPKC’s propane deliveries and at CN’s “movement of heavy fuel, propane, food and water treatment materials needed in remote communities and throughout Canada” to see whether local needs and a lack of alternatives make any of the railways’ work essential.

The deliberations are all that stand in the way of 72-hour strike or lockout notices at the railways. Once the board decides what, if any, services need to continue, the union locals or management at either company can set the clock ticking down to stopping everything else.

Labour groups and institutional employers have often resisted essential-service designations—unions because the inability to strike limits their leverage in labour disputes; employers because they believe binding arbitration results in larger payouts.

The CIRB asked for public submissions to help it make informed decisions and it got lots of them, primarily from industry groups. A frequent argument: O’Regan’s focus is too narrow.

Consider potash and grain, the Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association said in its filing. Potash isn’t food, but it’s a key ingredient in fertilizer for crops. Bulk grain isn’t precisely food, either, but it’s processed into food.

“So while rail is essential for the delivery of processed food products to remote communities, it is also essential to food production and the food security of all Canadians,” the association argued. “Products at all stages of the value chain to ensure food, energy and water security should be considered essential.”

Canola growers and processors described their products similarly—canola seeds get processed into food oil and protein meal for animal feed, and not just here in Canada.

O’Regan’s referrals to the CIRB included copies of a letter he’d received from the Canadian Propane Association, talking about potential shortages of the gas used in homes, greenhouses, dairies, crop dryers and even university campuses like Memorial University’s in St. John’s, N.L.

But in a statement to The Logic, O’Regan said he’s most concerned about seniors’ homes and hospitals, especially those outside big cities that heat with propane.

“Serious concerns had been raised about the impacts on the health and safety of Canadians, including threats to the operations of rural health-care infrastructure,” O’Regan wrote. “It’s our duty to look into this.”

But also, he added, “this is about keeping parties focused on the bargaining table. That’s how we find stability and certainty in our supply chains and our entire economy.”

Despite the specificity of the questions the labour board is dealing with, it’s heard a great deal about the wider economy.

CN and CPKC transport the equivalent of about 20,000 truckloads of packaged goods each week, wrote Dennis Prouse of Food, Health and Consumer Products of Canada, in another submission. The association represents manufacturers of packaged goods, from 3M to Blistex to McCain.

A full stoppage would cause shortages of staple foods, drugstore medications and baby formula, particularly in far-flung settlements that rely on CN, he wrote; recovering from a one-week strike would take six to eight times as long.

A shortage of beef might not be an immediate safety hazard to people, but a shortage of feed could devastate the cattle industry, said the submission from the National Cattle Feeders’ Association.

“One rail car is estimated to feed approximately 8,000 animals for only one day. And many feedlot operations, particularly in Alberta, have capacity of over 20,000 cattle,” it said. The group estimated that replacing the train deliveries with trucks would require 1,000 vehicles a week.

Kemira, a Finnish company that makes water treatment chemicals, told the board that a rail shutdown would have impacts across the continent. It has nine North American factories and they all rely on rail deliveries to supply water treatment plants from Los Angeles to Quebec City, its submission says.

“Considering the very long distances that both our raw materials and finished goods have to travel, across the country and even across the continent, it would be impossible to cover supply with any other mode of transportation,” Kemira’s submission says.

Of course, there’s self-interest in the submissions. If the CIRB decides grain is not essential, the Western Grain Elevator Association wants it to give the designation to as few other goods as possible, in the interests of getting a deal faster. The less money flowing to the railroad, and the fewer unionized workers getting cheques, the greater the pressure on the parties to negotiate, the association reasons.

In their responses, the railways and the Teamsters say many similar things: however important economic interests might be, they’re not public safety concerns; it’s not proven that trucks, ships and pipelines can’t deliver enough of various goods to meet critical needs; and many of the submissions are vague and speculative.

The Teamsters are especially scornful. “Some interested parties have inflated the importance of their obviously non-essential products to a point of absurdity,” the union’s final submission says. “The Canadian public is not at risk of immediate health and safety consequences with lower stocks of toilet paper, canned tuna and canola oil.

“We further note that in past railway strikes, neither Canada nor the global community plummeted into starvation on account of a brief halt in the delivery of grain, lentils and other foods.”

CN and CPKC say they’ve asked to send the contracts to binding arbitration and the Teamsters have said no. The Teamsters say they offered to bargain over their contracts with each railway one at a time and the railways said no.