“We fly as a team, we fight as a team”
That’s how the pilot sitting next to me explained his support for the strike on our train to YVR.
When the doors opened, the scene in front of me didn’t look like any picket line I had ever been to. If anything, it looked like the front row of a concert. Flight attendants, along with nearly one thousand supporters, were packed together so tightly I had a hard time even making it into the crowd.
When I finally squeezed in, I made eye contact with a flight attendant whose eyes lit up when he saw the cover of our paper: a big picture of Mark Carney next to the text “Doing The Bosses’ Bidding”.
“I hate that guy!” he said as he ripped the paper out of my hands, holding it in the air like it belonged with the hundreds of picket signs, banners, and union flags. He and everyone there was gripped with a righteous anger towards Air Canada and the federal government.
When the president of the ILWU took the mic and called the fight against Section 107 “a class war”, fists shot in the air, flags whipped back and forth, and cheers moved through the crowd like a tidal wave. The cheers from one CUPW worker next to me made my ears ring.
Later in the day, the same flight attendant from earlier brought one of his coworkers over to me to get his own copy of the paper. He pointed at the cover and yelled over the crowd that the problem wasn’t “just Mark Carney, or Air Canada, it’s the whole system that let them do this in the first place!”
