Chelsey St. Pierre – The Suburban LJI Reporter

Since October 31, 2023, school bus drivers serving more than 15,000 children on the island of Montreal have been on strike, affecting students and their families from the Lester B. Pearson School Board (LBPSB), the English Montreal School Board, the Centre de services scolaire de Montréal, the Centre de services scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys and Collège Sainte-Anne.

In a statement to parents and guardians, the LBPSB wrote “We are continuing to offer extended supervision for families of elementary students before school and/or after school on regular school days. We realize the inconveniences this situation may cause and are working with all the parties involved to try to resolve this matter as quickly as possible.”

The school board introduced contingencies designed to help mitigate the circumstances including:

-Extended supervision hours to elementary school students who would normally use school bus transportation. The service allows parents to drop off their children for supervision up to 45 minutes prior to start of school and 30 minutes after regular dismissal.

-Authorized third-party pick up of their child from elementary school at dismissal.

-Encouraging the use of carpooling and the use of public transit wherever possible to get students to and from school.

“Throughout the negotiation process, the Transco–CSN Workers’ Union has continuously made unreasonable demands which would not be viable to any school bus operator in the province of Quebec,” Longview Communications and Public Affairs Partner Claude Breton wrote to The Suburban.

According to Breton, this action by the union ensures that students continue to be prohibited from getting to school safely and creates continued challenges for the family members of the children, who are having to alter their schedules and commitments because of these lost opportunities created by the union. “Instead of coming to the bargaining table with realistic proposals, the union has decided to recently engage in a campaign of misinformation.”

Breton says that Transco bus drivers are some of the best paid hourly drivers in town. “For 10 weeks now, the Transco–CSN Workers’ Union has been formulating wage demands that are significantly higher than what CSN referred to in its media interviews, when talking about other collective agreements signed in school transportation in Quebec or talking of new funding granted by the government in 2022. The union’s demands would make it impossible for the company to carry out daily operations. Autobus Transco originally proposed a substantial salary increase. Given that the union continues to make unreasonable and unrealistic demands, in an interest to resolve the outstanding issues and get students back to school safely, this week Transco offered third-party arbitration to the union. This would allow an independent adjudicator to resolve all outstanding issues and ensure that students can get back to school safely and their families can resume their normal routines and schedules. Bus service could then resume, allowing drivers and their families to benefit immediately from the financially meaningful wage increases. Instead of allowing a neutral adjudicator to move forward immediately to resolve this strike, the union rejected our offer of third-party arbitration.” n