Mutual Promise: International Labour Law and BC Health Services (original) (raw)

Health Services and Support-Facilities Subsector Bargaining Assn. v. British Columbia represents the current high-water mark for international labour law in Canada, overruling 20 years of the Supreme Court's own jurisprudence not the freedom of association in Canada and relying heavily on international labour law to ground its decision. By acknowledging the relevance of international labour law to domestic constitutional normativity, the Court appears to be signalling a willingness to keep its international promises and accept the affirmation in Article 2 of the 1998 International Labour Organization ("ILO") Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights and Freedoms and its Follow-up. This article is also fairly broad, in that it seeks both to contextualize the contemporary development of international labour law, and to suggest future interpretive developments. In Part III, I argue that the Supreme Court of Canada's decision to recognize the right to bargain collectively as part of the constitutionally enshrined freedom of association in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms suggests that fundamental principles and rights at work can offer a counterbalance to (rather than mere acceptance of) a particular vision of economic globalization, that is, economic constitutionalism.