Binding Arbitration Closed the CN and CPKC Lockout That Stopped North American Freight After Ottawa Sent the Fight to William Kaplan

One minute after midnight Eastern on August 22, 2024, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Kansas City locked the gates on more than 9,000 Teamsters Canada Rail Conference members. Locomotives that haul prairie wheat, Saskatchewan potash, Alberta crude-by-rail, and auto parts bound for Michigan assembly lines sat where they were. The AEGIS Alliance first covered that night as a supply-chain story. The file that remains is a labor-law story. Ottawa did not wait for a ratified contract. It sent the fight to a board, then to a single arbitrator, and the raises that came back were imposed rather than voted.

The two Class I carriers move the overwhelming majority of Canadian rail freight and a large share of the traffic that crosses into the Upper Midwest. When both networks stop together, a grain elevator in North Dakota and a parts warehouse in Ontario feel it in the same week. That is why the original headline on this page warned that U.S. sectors could follow. The warning was not theoretical. Shippers had already watched CN and CPKC refuse new loads in the two weeks before the lockout so perishable and dangerous goods would not be stranded on the property.

How Two Expired Contracts Became One National Stoppage

The TCRC contracts covering train and engine crews had expired on December 31, 2023. CN’s earlier deal had been stretched a year so the two properties would come due together. Aligning the dates made a simultaneous shutdown possible. Through the spring and summer of 2024 the union pressed fatigue rules, rest, and crew consist. The carriers pressed scheduling flexibility and what they called sustainable cost. Federal mediators sat in the rooms. The rooms did not close a deal.

On August 18, 2024, the TCRC served a 72-hour strike notice on CPKC. The next day CN posted its own lockout notice. Maersk told customers it would stop accepting rail-dependent boxes into Canada. U.S. connecting roads tightened interchange. Labour Minister Steve MacKinnon spent August 21 telling both sides to keep talking and declined, at that hour, to impose arbitration. The talking ended at the deadline. At 00:01 on August 22 both companies locked out the TCRC. CPKC’s U.S. and Mexican operations kept running. CN’s U.S. lines kept running. The Canadian main lines did not.

CBC recorded the minister’s reversal the same day. MacKinnon used section 107 of the Canada Labour Code and referred the dispute to the Canada Industrial Relations Board with a direction for binding interest arbitration. He said trains would move again within days. Moody’s had already put a daily price tag on a full stop in the neighborhood of $341 million, a figure the ratings house tied to roughly 4 percent of Canadian GDP if the halt lingered. Grain, autos, coal, and potash were the first commodities named in shipper alerts.

The CIRB Order and the Union Appeal

CN lifted its lockout on August 23 and told crews to come back while the board wrote. The TCRC answered with a strike notice on CN and said the minister’s referral itself was a constitutional problem. On August 24 the CIRB ordered everyone back and set August 26 as the date trains had to roll. The order killed the lockout and voided the fresh strike notice. The union complied and filed at the Federal Court of Appeal on August 29, asking the court to restore the right to strike. Binding arbitration was scheduled to open the same week.

Recovery was not instant. CN told customers each day of a shutdown can take three to five days to unwind. CPKC talked in terms of weeks for a full network. Auto plants that run just-in-time inventories had already begun looking at trucks. Chemical plants watched tank-car queues. The point of the original reporting from The AEGIS Alliance was that a Canadian labor fight becomes a Midwest inventory problem in two days. That still holds. See the Notícias Internacionais and Política desks for the broader pattern of governments stepping into transport disputes.

Kaplan’s Awards: Three Percent a Year, No Ratification Vote

Arbitrator William Kaplan, a familiar name in Canadian interest arbitration, drew both files. On April 7, 2025, he issued the CN award. Railway Age and FreightWaves published the wage line: a three-year agreement running January 1, 2024, through December 31, 2026, with 3 percent general increases each year for about 6,000 TCRC members on the CN property. There was no ratification vote. The document replaced the expired book.

On May 30, 2025, Kaplan issued the CPKC award. That one ran four years, January 1, 2024, through December 31, 2027, again at 3 percent a year, covering the TCRC Train and Engine division and the Rail Canada Traffic Controllers. CPKC posted a company bulletin the same day. Union locals circulated highlight sheets that listed the term, the wage grid, and the items Kaplan reserved for later implementation hearings. The TCRC said the 3 percent figure sat below the inflation that members had already eaten through 2022 and 2023. The carriers called the awards a stable path back to scheduled operations.

Implementation did not end on the award dates. TCRC Calgary and other locals posted that the parties sat in Toronto on November 18, 2025, for a Kaplan hearing on leftover issues, including how conductor-only language and initial-and-final terminal rules would be enforced under the new books. Supplemental awards followed into 2026. Those documents are the quiet second half of a story that began with picket lines and empty sidings.

What the Lockout Cost on the U.S. Side of the Border

American readers met this dispute as a map problem. CN and CPKC feed elevators in the northern plains, potash terminals that supply U.S. farms, and the auto corridor that runs from Ontario into Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky. When Canadian crews are locked out, U.S. short lines and Class I connections do not get the cars they expected. Manufacturers pay demurrage and late penalties. Trucking spots vanish. That is the same vulnerability The AEGIS Alliance has tracked in other fragile networks, from the rail file itself to the cyber and logistics pieces on the Technology desk.

The 2022 Canadian Pacific strike lasted about 60 hours and still backed up grain. CN’s 2019 walkout ran nine days. The 2024 lockout was shorter on the calendar because Ottawa cut it off, not because the parties settled. Shippers who rerouted that weekend did not get those dollars back. The lesson for U.S. purchasing desks is blunt. A labor statute in another country can empty a warehouse in Illinois before a congressional hearing is scheduled.

The Right-to-Strike Fight That Outlived the Sidings

The TCRC’s Federal Court of Appeal filing was never only about one weekend. Canadian unions have spent a decade arguing that section 107 referrals and back-to-work orders gut the right to strike that the Supreme Court of Canada has treated as constitutionally protected in other contexts. The government answer is always the same phrase: national interest. Rail is a federal undertaking. Food, fuel, and export contracts sit on those rails. Ministers from more than one party have used the same tool.

What changed in this round is the pairing. Two Class I properties, one union, one midnight. That pairing is why business groups asked Ottawa to move before the lockout and why the union says the move proved the companies could force a political rescue by shutting the country together. Readers who follow accountability reporting from The AEGIS Alliance will recognize the shape. Power concentrates. The public pays the inventory cost. The legal fight is postponed into a courtroom that most shippers will never enter.

Through early September 2026 there had been no new national lockout on the CN or CPKC properties. The Kaplan books are the working contracts. Members are running trains under terms they did not ratify. That is the current state of the file, not a victory lap and not a closed case. The next expiry on the CN award is December 31, 2026. The CPKC book runs a year longer. Anyone who moves freight across that border should mark both dates.

Related reporting from The AEGIS Alliance includes the Quarkslab RFID backdoor investigation, the FTC romance-scam loss report, and ongoing coverage on the Notícias dos Estados Unidos desk of how cross-border systems fail in public.

The AEGIS Alliance will keep the lockout on the politics and international wires because the next contract fight is already on the calendar. Binding arbitration ended the 2024 stoppage. It did not settle whether Canadian rail crews will ever again be allowed to walk off the property when talks die at midnight.