Air Canada flight attendants have taken to the streets in several cities across the country to protest job cuts before they meet with airline officials later this week to discuss the impact of the layoffs on workers.
In Winnipeg, more than 300 people marched down Portage Avenue to the Air Canada call centre.
They cheered Manitoba Premier Gary Doer, who said shutting down the Winnipeg flight attendant base makes no economic sense.
More than 600 flight attendants are being cut by Air Canada, which is reducing capacity in the face of soaring fuel costs.
Halifax and Winnipeg will be particularly hard hit, because the airline is closing its flight attendant bases in those cities by Nov. 1.
A crowd of about 150 people rallied on Halifax's historic Grand Parade in front of city hall to voice their opposition to the Halifax closure.
Placard carrying flight attendants and their families were joined by a cross-section of union leaders and politicians.
On Friday, federal Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn rejected the airline's request to lay off employees without first setting up a joint union-company committee to examine ways to ease the impact of the cuts.
Lisa Vivian Anthony, local president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Halifax, said Blackburn's move is significant because it gives the union protections under the Canada Labour Code.
"This is a big business decision and they (Air Canada) have to be accountable for that,'' said Anthony.
Anthony said the union will meet with Air Canada in a joint planning committee on Thursday and Friday at a yet to be determined location.
She said the goal of the meeting is to find out what the company plans to do for the workers who face layoffs or transfers to other cities.
New Democrat MP Alexa McDonough told the cheering crowd that the closure of the base would have a direct affect on Atlantic Canada's economy and on the continued growth of Halifax's Stanfield International Airport.
"We need to make the point that 3.5 million passengers travelled through that airport last year ... and the assessment is that this has contributed $1.2 billion to our economy,'' said McDonough.
Anthony said the union also wants to see more sharing of information from its meeting with the company.
"For the longest time Air Canada would not provide us with the base viability studies,'' she said. "They would not tell us the reasons why they came to this devastating decision and we want to see those viability studies to do our own careful analysis.''
