The City of Vancouver is being accused of unfair labour practices in a formal complaint by a union representing thousands of municipal workers.

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CUPE Local 15, which represents more than 4,000 employees with the city, park board, and community centres, filed a complaint with the B.C. Labour Relations Board on Dec. 24, alleging that during last year’s collective bargaining negotiations, the city withheld important information about coming job cuts.

The union says the city violated the Labour Relations Code by “intentionally withholding important information about its plans to implement far-reaching workforce reductions until after bargaining had concluded and the collective agreement had been ratified,” CUPE 15 acting president Santino Scardillo told Postmedia in an email Friday. “In doing so, it breached its duty to bargain in good faith.”

“We believe the city intentionally withheld critical information during bargaining,” Scardillo said. “They knew they intended to eliminate hundreds of members’ positions, and that was deceitful and unfair to not share all the information.”

CUPE alleges that city management knew as early as June 2025 about potential job cuts. At that time, the union and the city were in collective bargaining, and CUPE says the city ought to have disclosed such information.

“The city is in the process of reviewing and responding to the application,” a city spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

In June 2025, city staff told council a seven per cent property tax increase would be required to maintain existing services for this year. Vancouver council’s ABC majority then directed city staff to find “efficiencies” to keep the tax hike no higher than 3½ per cent. In October, ABC Vancouver went further, directing city staff to find $120 million in savings or new revenues to ensure there would be no property tax increases at all.

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That property tax freeze was expected to mean cutting the equivalent of about 400 full-time positions, according to an estimate in an internal memo from the city manager’s office in November, shortly before council approved the final budget for 2026. About two-thirds, or around 270, of the positions to be cut were expected to be union positions, and the remaining 130 were likely to be exempt, or non-union, jobs.

Some non-union employees took advantage of a “voluntary separation program” late last year and left of their own accord.

Now, CUPE wants the Labour Relations Board to direct the city and the union to renegotiate the parts of the collective agreement that it alleges were “materially impacted by the information omitted,” Scardillo said, “or alternatively that the employer will not be allowed to move forward with the workforce reductions that were a result of the bad-faith conduct during the term of this collective agreement.”

Scardillo did not rule out the possibility that the labour board could invalidate the existing collective agreement, which was ratified in September 2025 and extends through December 2026.

If the agreement were invalidated, then the standard bargaining process and rules would apply, Scardillo said, which means members would be in a position where they could call for a strike vote, and potentially strike.

But Kendra Strauss, director of Simon Fraser University’s labour studies program, said it seems unlikely the board would invalidate the agreement, let alone that workers could strike this year.

There have been instances where the B.C. Labour Relations Board has ruled that employers engaged in bad-faith bargaining, including ICBC in 2012 and Strauss’s own employer, SFU, in 2013. However, in those cases, the collective agreements had not yet been ratified, and the result of the LRB’s findings was simply to send the parties back to the bargaining table — not to tear up an existing collective agreement.

“It would be highly, highly unusual for the Labour Relations Board to invalidate a collective agreement that has already been negotiated and ratified,” Strauss said.

“But it may also be the case that this has just not been tested, where cases have not been brought where an active collective agreement is in place. … This is an interesting test case.”

“I can’t speculate whether that’s going to be successful, but the union clearly feels this is an important case to bring, given the circumstances,” Strauss said.

Rather than re-opening the whole collective agreement, it could make more sense for the LRB to direct the parties to renegotiate certain parts of it, Strauss said.

Shafik Bhalloo, a labour law expert and professor at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business, also said it would be highly unusual for the LRB to invalidate a collective agreement solely on the basis of this kind of breach.

“While the board has broad remedial authority, setting aside a concluded collective agreement is an exceptional remedy and would only arise in the most extreme circumstances,” Bhalloo said.

The office of Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim, who leads council’s ABC majority, declined to comment.

Ken Georgetti, the former president of the Canadian Labour Congress and B.C. Federation of Labour, said if city management knew last summer that layoffs were coming, “then they had an obligation to share that with the union when they knew it, as soon as they knew it.”

“You’ve got to come to the bargaining table with clean hands if you want to maintain a good relationship with the representatives of the workers,” Georgetti said.

However, he said, it remains to be seen whether the Labour Relations Board will find the city actually breached the code.

dfumano@postmedia.com

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