INDEPENDENCE, Ohio, September 18 — BLET National President Dennis R. Pierce was the opening speaker today as the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference’s (TCRC) Fourth Quadrennial Convention got underway in Vancouver, B.C.
Speaking at the invitation of TCRC President Douglas Finnson, President Pierce described the BLET’s long history with Canada, which dates back nearly 153 years. The first Canadian Division of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was founded in Toronto on December 5, 1865.
“For the next 138 years, locomotive engineers from Canada and locomotive engineers from the United States struggled side-by-side against the railroads to improve the wages, benefits and working conditions of those who toil in our noble craft,” he said.
When the former BLE merged with the Teamsters union in 2004, the administrative structure of the union required the separation of the Canadian members into the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC), with the remaining portion of the original BLE becoming the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen in the U.S.
“This shared history is not something that simply disappeared when the BLE merged with the Teamsters in 2004 and the U.S. and Canadian Rail Conferences were formed,” he said.
President Pierce then described how BLET and TCRC recently fought together to overturn the Canadian Pacific Railway’s efforts to eliminate the crew change point at Emerson and run crews through between Winnipeg and Thief River Falls. He also discussed how the BLET and TCRC are collaborating to strengthen NAFTA to explicitly protect the jobs of Canadian and American railroad workers.
“The bonds created by our shared history made that collaboration feel more like a family reunion than anything else,” President Pierce said.
Teamsters Canada represents 125,000 members north of the border, including more than 16,000 TCRC members who work in the railroad industry. TCRC is the collective bargaining representative for workers at the Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, as well as the majority of short line railways in Canada.
A transcript of President Pierce’s remarks can be found here.