Labour: the wage costume¶
The clean line the thesis reaches for, they undercut the unions, dies the moment you check it. And the honest version is sharper than the slogan. Both of these men brand themselves pro-worker, and the labour movement believed them. In the 2025 election the Edmonton District Labour Council and Civic Service Union 52 both endorsed Andrew Knack for mayor and Michael Janz for papastew (2025 endorsements). Janz has been union-endorsed three straight elections on an anti-privatization, pro-living-wage platform, and neither man ever cast a public vote against a union contract. When a collective agreement reached the council floor, they voted yes to ratify it, every time, from CUPE to the firefighters (ratification roll-calls). So this is not a page about how they voted. It is a page about the wages their council delivered as the boss. The same thirteen people who ratify the finished contract are the employer who decides, first, how little to offer.
Look at the mandate, not the handshake¶
The trick to reading a labour record honestly is knowing where the decision actually gets made. The ratification vote is theatre by the time it reaches the chamber. A public, near-unanimous yes on a settled deal. The real decision is the bargaining mandate: the number the city walks into the room with, the "best and final" it dares the workers to reject, the choice to let a contract lapse for years rather than move. And that decision is set in closed session, where no roll-call is published and no councillor's name attaches to the lowball (ratification roll-calls). You cannot pin the opening offer on Janz or Knack as an individual vote, because the record does not exist. It was made by the whole council sitting in private, as the employer. That absence is not a hole in the case. It is the case. The wage restraint was a collective decision of the body that brands itself progressive, made where the public could not watch, while the one budget line that never had to bargain for a cent grew on the police formula.
What the employer offered¶
Start with the biggest civilian workforce in the city. Civic Service Union 52 represents roughly 5,000 people who run Edmonton: the clerks, the librarians, the inspectors, the people who answer the phone at 311. They went without a wage increase from 2018 and worked with no contract at all from December 2020 (CSU 52 wage restraint). When the city finally sat down, its opening offer was 0% in 2021, 1% in 2022, 2% in 2023. A number the union rightly called a real-terms rollback, since inflation ran 6 to 7% in 2022 alone and many members' hours had risen, dragging hourly pay back toward 2018 levels. Members threw the city's "best and final offer" back in its face and voted it down. The deal that finally settled in March 2024 was a $1,000 lump sum and 0% / 1.25% / 2% / 3% across four years. Every single year below inflation. That is not a raise. It is a managed pay cut for five thousand of the city's own, negotiated by a council that calls itself the workers' friend. The firefighters fared no better. International Association of Fire Fighters Local 209 went nearly six years without a contract, from its December 2018 expiry until an arbitrator finally imposed terms in December 2024 (IAFF 209 arbitration). The city and the union could not settle, so it went to arbitration, and the imposed award landed at about 2.1% a year, roughly 10.7% compounded over five years, sub-inflation, and only reached because a third party made the call the employer would not. Six years of your emergency responders working under an expired deal, ending in a below-inflation number nobody at the city had to sign their name to. Set the two stories beside the roll-calls the council was happy to make public, and the shape is unmistakable. The finished deal is always a unanimous yes, and the years of restraint that produced it are always invisible.
| Date | Item (public vote) | Janz | Knack |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-06-20 | CUPE Local 30 settlement ratified | Yes | Yes |
| 2023-03-14 | IBEW Local 1007 agreement ratified | Yes | Yes |
| 2025-05-21 | CSU 52 agreement ratified (0/1.25/2/3) | Yes | Yes |
| 2025-09-16 | IAFF 209 arbitrated deal ratified (~2.1%/yr) | Yes | Yes |
| 2025-09-16 | EPS Senior Officers' Association ratified | Yes | Yes |
The wage restraint that produced those numbers never appears here. It was set as a mandate, in private, by the same body. Meanwhile the police line, alone among them, grew on a formula that answered to no bargaining table at all.
The union that came after Janz was the police union¶
There is a rumour that will not die: that Janz once signed a letter against a union. We looked, and it is not there; no source confirms it, so we do not assert it. What the record does hold is the inverse, and it is more revealing. In January 2022, in Janz's first three months on council, the Edmonton Police Association filed twenty-four code-of-conduct complaints against him, citing his tweets criticizing police spending. The Integrity Commissioner assessed all twenty-four and found every one without merit (EPA's 24 complaints). Janz called it "a blatant attempt at intimidation intended to silence an elected official in their first three months in office," and he was right. But notice which union this was. The police association is carceral labour, the organized muscle of the institution on cruise control. And it went to war against a councillor precisely for questioning the police budget. That is a different thing entirely from the workers' movement the pro-worker brand invokes. When labour actually moved against Janz, it was the cops' union punishing him for the one fight he genuinely picked.
The quotes, and the outcome¶
So hold the brand up against the record. In his own words, to the province's largest union, Janz is as pro-labour as a candidate gets.
Michael Janz, AUPE candidate questionnaire, 2021
On privatization: "I have a record of opposing P3s and privatization over my 11 years as EPSB Trustee… I will absolutely continue to fight to oppose attempts to privatize municipal services and infrastructure."
On wages: "The creation of good jobs is central to my platform and that means living wages, job security and where possible full-time hours and I absolutely support the right of employees to collectively bargain." (AUPE questionnaire)
Every word of that is real, and none of it is the point. The point is that a councillor can mean all of it. Can oppose privatization, champion the living wage, get endorsed by the workers three elections running. And still sit on the employer's side of a table that hands its own five thousand workers a four-year pay cut and lets its firefighters age out of a contract. The costume is not a lie about his beliefs. It is the gap between his beliefs and what the body he sits on actually paid the people who keep the city running. Knack draws the line a step further toward capital: as mayor he says council "shouldn't shy away" from private partnerships to build new infrastructure (Knack on P3s). Read against the wage record, the pattern is the same one that runs through the sweeps and the starved frontline: the language of solidarity, and the arithmetic of restraint.
Honest complication: what this record does and does not show
Three things have to be said plainly or the argument cheats. Janz is not anti-union. The record refutes it flatly. He is union-endorsed three straight elections, he opposed the UCP's 2020 school-support-staff layoffs as a trustee, and he votes the pro-labour line. The exhibit is the wage outcome under his council, not his loyalty, and we do not pretend otherwise. The lowball was a closed-session employer decision, not an attributable Janz or Knack vote. There is no public roll-call to point at, and we invent none. And both major unions endorsed both men in 2025, which we report because it is true and because it measures how low the electoral ceiling sits. The city-workers' own union backed the council that held their wages under inflation, not out of gratitude but because the alternative on the ballot was worse. That is lesser-evilism, the exact ceiling this project names, not evidence that the system delivered for workers. Knack's openness to P3s, finally, is for new capital projects; he says he opposes privatizing existing services, and we hold the claim there rather than stretch it.
How this was built
The endorsements come from the EDLC and CSU 52's own 2025 election pages; the CSU 52 and IAFF 209 wage histories from CBC, Global, Alberta Worker, and the unions' own settlement summaries; the ratification votes from the City of Edmonton open-data voting record (dataset ekzq-b4qg, Janz in m_janz, Knack in a_knack); the EPA complaints from the Integrity Commissioner's February 2022 ruling as reported by Alberta Politics, Taproot, and CTV; and Janz's own labour language from his 2021 AUPE questionnaire. The bargaining mandates themselves are sealed in closed session and cannot be attributed to an individual councillor. See the full methodology.