Mutual Promise: International Labour Law and BC Health Services (original) (raw)
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"This is Hallowed Ground": Canada and International Labour Law
CIGI Reflections Series Paper no.22 Blackett.pdf
A specialized agency of the United Nations that predates both the United Nations and the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Labour Organization (ILO) was founded at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and was part of the Treaty of Versailles. Although Canada was not part of the initial Commission on International Labour Legislation of the Peace Conference that was “called upon...to draft plans for an organization which had no parallel in the history of politics,” Canada gained “international recognition of her national maturity by her admission to the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization as an original Member.” Canada also became the first ILO member to send a woman to participate in the governing body, in 1923. But Canada’s most unique contribution remains that it provided a wartime home for the ILO, at McGill University. In Canada, the ILO prepared its postwar policy, including its approach to decolonization, and readied itself for a more outward-looking approach as part of a soon-to-emerge UN system. During that same time, the ILO reaffirmed the “truth” of its 1919 constitutional affirmation that “lasting peace can be established only if it is based on social justice” in the historic 1944 constitutional annex adopted at the International Labour Conference in Philadelphia (the Declaration of Philadelphia). A renowned international labour official and subsequent director-general of the ILO, C. Wilfred Jenks, delivered these words as part of a thank-you speech to the Canadian government: “This is hallowed ground in the history of the ILO. Here we kept alive in a world at war the ideal and practice of international collaboration in pursuit of social justice in a world of freedom.” This paper is a deliberate exercise in remembering the hallowed ground in the history of the ILO. It recalls the historical ideal of international labour law (ILL) in the ILO’s founding to explain the renewed relevance of ILL in the midst of global restructuring. The paper traces a similar trajectory through the story of ILL in the Canadian courts. Throughout, the paper suggests that the evolution of ILL, internationally and in Canada, constitutes a crucial basis upon which to build ILL’s transnational futures.
Industrial Law Journal, 2008
In June 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada expressly overruled twenty years of jurisprudence that interpreted the freedom of association as excluding collective bargaining. This about face by the Supreme Court was unexpected. What gave rise to this remarkable decision and what does it portend for the role of the courts in labour relations in Canada and beyond? The recent successes before courts have led some observers to suggest that it may now be a propitious time for a coordinated and proactive litigation strategy to vindicate labour's collective rights. This article offers some preliminary answers to these broader questions and issues by focussing on the Supreme Court's decision in the Health Services and Support case.
Global Labour Journal, 2019
The year 2017 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Health Services case, a precedent-setting decision by the Supreme Court of Canada that ruled collective bargaining is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This article explores the impact and legacy of BC Health Services, and finds that while workers’ constitutional rights have been expanded under the Charter over the past decade, governments nevertheless continue to violate these rights. It concludes that the legacy of the case is not an enhanced level of protection for these rights to be enjoyed fully, but rather that the default option has been and will continue to be a financial penalty for the state in instances in which they violate workers’ rights. KEYWORDS labour rights; Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; human rights; health services
2008
In its recent decision in B.C. Health Services, the Supreme Court of Canada took the monumental step of overruling its own precedents in the Labour Trilogy, by holding that the Charter guarantee of freedom of association does in fact protect a union’s right to engage in collective bargaining. The author argues that, while the decision marks a new era for labour relations in Canada, the Court’s methodology may have regressive consequences more generally for the interpretation of associational freedom under section 2(d) of the Charter. She focuses on three aspects of this methodology. First, in constitutionalizing the right of access to a collective bargaining procedure free from “substantial” government interference (but not the outcomes of that procedure), the decision creates a model of due process which could downgrade the entitlement in section 2(d) from a substantive to a procedural one.Second, while the imposition of a duty on employers to bargain in good faith may appear progr...
This paper examines the Canadian Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in favour of the Health Employees Union (HEU) versus the British Columbia government. Based on international labour law, this ruling recognised collective bargaining as part of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While recent research in human and labour geography on labour law and the state have emphasised its contingent, topological and site-based nature I argue: (i) that this case reflects how Canadian unions became deeply embedded in post-war hegemonic splicings of law and space and the state's role in the reproduction of the wage-labour relation and (ii) while the HEU's struggles and the use of international law contest such splicings, these are still sharply inflected by existing nation-state legal systems that remain both relatively resilient and ambivalent about labour rights. The HEU case thus reveals that scaling up by law may not protect worker interests if labour is otherwise weak.
Journal of Workplace Rights, 2011
With increasing vigor, unions are championing the claim that "labor rights are human rights." This is especially true in Canada and is aided by a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 2007 that affords constitutional protection to the right to bargain collectively. Constructing labor rights as human rights relies on a judicial-based strategy at both the national and the international level, including the use of the International Labour Organization (ILO). This article seeks to determine how useful the ILO is to the Canadian labour movement. It finds that the ILO is of little use to Canadian unions in and of itself, but that it is more useful when Canadian courts apply the provisions of international law to domestic legislation. As a recent case history shows, however, there is no guarantee that the Supreme Court will elect to adopt the provisions of international law.
For the first twenty-five years after the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted, it appeared that it would have little impact on Canadian labour laws. The Supreme Court of Canada took the view that the guarantee of freedom of association in the Charter did not include a right to strike and did not provide protection for collective bargaining. Common law rules regulating picketing did not come within the scope of the Charter’s rules on freedom of expression. Academic commentators were divided on whether this was a good or a bad thing, some espousing the hope that the Charter could be applied in pursuit of greater justice in the workplace while others were thankful that the courts were not interfering with legislative formulation of collective bargaining law and policy. Slowly, however, the courts have come to a different view of the Charter, finding that its values serve to provide protection for picketing, and in a sweeping revision of former jurisprudence in 2007 holding that the guarantee of freedom of association does provide protection for collective bargaining. This article describes the changing judicial views of the Charter through three distinct periods, each roughly a decade long: the formative period, the period of consolidation, and the period of re-assessment. It also traces some of the academic reaction to these developments. It concludes by an assessment of how trade unions are attempting to harness the changing view of the Charter to pursue a variety of challenges to the existing legislated collective bargaining schemes in Canada. In doing so, the paper uses the metaphor of the Charter as a cathedral, with the judges and academic commentators as artists painting a variety of views of the Cathedral. It is only through assessing the multiplicity of views that one can hope to achieve even a partial understanding of the Charter’s role in Canadian labour law. Pendant les vingt-cinq premières années qui ont suivi l’adoption de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés, il a semblé qu’elle n’aurait que peu d’incidences sur les lois canadiennes sur le travail. La Cour suprême du Canada estimait que la garantie de liberté d’association prévue dans la Charte ne couvrait pas le droit de faire la grève et n’offrait pas de protection pour la négociation collective. Les règles de common law en matière de piquetage n’étaient pas visées par les dispositions de la Charte sur la liberté d’expression. Les observateurs du milieu universitaire étaient partagés sur la question de savoir s’il s’agissait d’une bonne ou d’une mauvaise chose; certains exprimaient l’espoir que la Charte puisse être appliquée dans la poursuite d’une meilleure justice en milieu de travail, d’autres étaient simplement reconnaissants que les tribunaux ne s’immiscent pas dans la formulation par le pouvoir législatif des lois et des politiques en matière de négociation collective. Les tribunaux en sont toutefois lentement venus à adopter une opinion différente de la Charte et ont conclu que ses valeurs servent à offrir une protection pour le piquetage, et en 2007, s’écartant remarquablement de la jurisprudence existante, ils ont conclu que la garantie de liberté d’association confère une protection pour la négociation collective.Cet article décrit l’évolution de la jurisprudence en ce qui a trait à la Charte pendant trois périodes, chacune étant à peu près d’une décennie : la période formative, la période de consolidation et la période de réévaluation. Il y est aussi question de la réaction de certains auteurs et observateurs à ces développements. L’article conclut sur une évaluation de la façon dont les syndicats tentent de profiter du changement de point de vue sur la Charte pour poursuivre diverses contestations des régimes de négociation collective qui existent actuellement au Canada. Ce faisant, l’article considère métaphoriquement la Charte comme une cathédrale, les juges et les observateurs du milieu universitaire étant des artistes qui en peignent chacun une vue différente. Ce n’est qu’en procédant à un examen de la multiplicité de vues que l’on peut espérer comprendre, ne fût-ce que partiellement, le rôle de la Charte en droit canadien du travail.
The Supreme Court of Canada and the Right to Bargain Collectively in Canada and Beyond
2008
In June 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada expressly overruled twenty years of jurisprudence that interpreted the freedom of association as excluding collective bargaining. This about face by the Supreme Court was unexpected. What gave rise to this remarkable decision and what does it portend for the role of the courts in labour relations in Canada and beyond? The recent successes before courts have led some observers to suggest that it may now be a propitious time for a coordinated and proactive litigation strategy to vindicate labour's collective rights. This article offers some preliminary answers to these broader questions and issues by focussing on the Supreme Court's decision in the Health Services and Support case.
2016
Cet article dkcrie la ligislation du gouvernement de la Colombie-Britannique qui fauorise la privatisa-tion des soins de santk (his 29 et 94) et fait retourner trente ans en arritre hs gains en kquitksalariale desf mmes qui travaillent duns les services de santk. Les auteures assurent qu hussitbt que les corporations multinationales de sew-ices sont bien installkes dans Ie secteur, les salairesplus bas et les bhe5cespour les employkes sans contrats deuiennent kz norme, auecle rksultatque lessakzires des femrnesduns certainssecteursddvolw a m hommes uont se dktkriorer, klargis-