Montreal transit agency seeks mediation with bus, metro drivers to avoid more strikes

MONTREAL – Montreal’s public transit agency has asked the provincial government to appoint a mediator to help settle a labour dispute with bus and metro drivers, who are set to join maintenance workers and walk off the job next month.

Roughly 4,500 transit workers announced they intend to strike on Nov. 1, 15 and 16. Meanwhile, about 2,400 maintenance employees who have gone on strike twice since June have announced labour action for most of November.

“We’re going to do everything we can to avoid this strike,” Marie-Claude Léonard, the transit agency’s general director, told reporters in Montreal about the planned job action of bus and metro drivers. 

“We’re convinced that the presence of a mediator will get us closer to reaching an agreement.”

However, a mediator didn’t help settle things with maintenance workers. The agency and the union representing them have been in mediation since Oct. 7, but that didn’t stop the union from announcing a third strike, this time from Halloween night until Nov. 28. The members say they will refuse to work overtime and limit bus and metro service outside rush hours, but the full details of the strike have yet to be announced.

Two earlier strikes by maintenance workers — over nine days in June and two weeks in late September and early October — disrupted travel across the network, which recorded about 1 million trips per day in 2024.

Léonard said talks are stalled because the agency is not willing to make cuts to essential services that she said are inevitable if they were to meet the maintenance union’s salary demands. “Cutting services is not an option,” she said. “Right now, the union’s demands at the table would require us to cut 10 per cent of bus service, which is unacceptable.”

Katherine Roux-Groleau, a spokesperson for the transit agency, said they contacted Quebec’s labour minister to ask for a mediator as soon as they got word the bus and metro drivers were planning to walk off the job. Their collective agreement expired in January.

“We are still undergoing a negotiation blitz at the moment with the drivers,” said Roux-Groleau. “Several meetings are currently booked, and as soon as the mediator is appointed, (they’ll) be added to those meetings.”

Frédéric Therrien, the president of the bus and metro drivers union, said his team is willing to meet with a mediator. The workers decided to strike after more than 50 negotiation sessions with the transit agency, he added.

Bus drivers, he said, deserve to be paid more, as Montreal “is the most challenging place you can drive in, where working conditions are the worst, and where we’re among the lowest paid.”

The starting salary for a driver is about $29 an hour, and rises to roughly $35 an hour, excluding overtime. “We think that’s unacceptable,” Therrien said. 

His members often have run-ins with aggressive passengers, he said, adding that they also have to contend with unpaid breaks in between switching bus routes. 

But Léonard said the transit agency has to contend with serious budget constraints. It needs to cut $100 million over the next three years, when it had initially planned to spread the cuts over five years. As a result, the agency must abolish 300 positions, she said.

Asked whether the province is underfunding public transit in Montreal, Léonard wouldn’t say. 

The public transit agency is struggling with an aging network it says it can no longer afford to maintain. In March, it decried a roughly $258-million reduction in provincial funding over three years for the upkeep of the metro system, far from the $585 million it had asked for.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 23, 2025.