As more than 7,000 terminal workers at British Columbia ports approach legal strike action, concern is growing about what a job action might mean for the economy.

On Monday, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada voted more than 99 per cent to strike against the B.C. Maritime Employers Association, meaning a work stoppage could begin on June 24 without any progression in negotiations.

Now, experts are sounding the alarm that job action could seriously hurt the economies of not only British Columbia, but Canada as a whole.

“Any kind of slowdown can have significant disputations to our economy,” Bridgitte Anderson, president and CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, told BNN Bloomberg Tuesday.

“The impact would be quite far reaching and that is why we’re so concerned about any kind of impact due to labour disruption. It could take days, weeks or months to resolve.”

In addition to snags on the supply chain, Anderson worries job action will hurt Canadians’ wallet in a time of already high inflation. 

“We are held a little bit hostage by what happens at the ports with importing and exporting, and so we're really relying on the two sides to come together and to work to find a solution so that we don’t have any work stoppages,” she said.

On its website, the B.C. Maritime Employers Association acknowledged how “critical” the ports are to Canada’s economy.

“That’s why we’re dedicated to making reasonable efforts to conclude agreements without further disruptions to the supply chain,” a statement reads on the site.

According to the BCMEA, member ports handled $180 billion in cargo in 2020 and contributed $2.7 billion to the national GDP.

Meanwhile, John Corey, president of the Freight Management Association of Canada, said even the threat of job action has repercussions.

“This could be a huge problem,” he said. “Weeks before a strike actually happens, while negotiations are taking place, shippers are looking for alternative routes and the current routes that they have are the most efficient so any other route is less efficient and also more expensive.”

Corey added that the supply chain experiences about seven days of backlog for every day of stoppage.

“The problem right now is the supply chain, there’s no slack in it,” he said. “If there’s any small disruption it takes a long time to clear that out.”

“Being shut down for even a day … is billions of dollars.”

Dan Fong, an investment analyst at Veritas Investment Research, worries a disruption will hurt an already fragile supply chain.


“That’s going to exacerbate a lot of the volume weakness that we’re seeing,” he said.