Education has long been a political battleground in Ontario. Twenty-five years ago, teachers were already at the heart of the fight against Mike Harris’ “common sense revolution”.
This time around, it’s the support workers who have engaged in a showdown with Doug Ford’s government, which has decided to use the notwithstanding clause — the notorious “notwithstanding clause” — to prevent them from doing strike and impose a new collective agreement on them.
It’s that the Keeping Children in School Act, which is unleashing passions at Queen’s Park, from which about fifteen NDP MPs were expelled on Wednesday, clearly goes against the decision handed down in 2015. by the Supreme Court of Canada in the wake of a public sector labor dispute in Saskatchewan.
In labor law, this judgment marked a historic turning point. For the first time, the right to strike was recognized as a constitutional right inseparable from the freedom of association guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
By using the notwithstanding clause to circumvent its provisions, the Ford government is reigniting a debate that has continued since the charter was enshrined in the 1982 Constitution — and the outcome of which could have serious consequences for the Quebec.
When the Constitution was repatriated by the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the notwithstanding clause was included in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the request of the western provinces and the British Parliament, but it was Quebec that quickly became its main user. Until the arrival of Mr. Ford, Ontario had never dared to take advantage of it.
To mark its disagreement with the adoption of a new Constitution against the will of Quebec, the Lévesque government had systematically included a “notwithstanding clause” in all bills adopted by the National Assembly.
This practice was abandoned when the Liberals returned to power in 1985. The indignation was all the greater in the rest of the country when the Bourassa government invoked it again in 1988 to maintain the rule of unilingualism. French in commercial signage, contrary to another judgment of the Supreme Court.
English Canada saw a confirmation of a turpitude of which it had long been convinced when the Legault government used the notwithstanding clause preemptively in order to put Bill 21 on secularism and Bill 96 on language shelter from legal proceedings.
Despite the annoyance this may cause him, the rest of Canada more or less resigned himself to seeing the black sheep of the federation break the rules of Canadian propriety. But if this delinquency becomes contagious, he may decide that the time has come to put an end to it.
Justin Trudeau no doubt echoed what many Canadians think when he said that “the idea of taking away or suspending fundamental rights, it’s becoming more and more common in different governments, and that [le] much concern”. “We are looking at the different tools that we could have,” he also noted.
It will be objected that we should not compare apples and oranges, that using the notwithstanding clause to settle a labor dispute has nothing to do with protecting the identity of an entire people. But in English Canada, however, we risk seeing things differently.
“ Rights are rights are rights exclaimed in 1988 one of the resigning ministers of the Bourassa government, Clifford Lincoln. If freedom of association — with which the Supreme Court has associated the right to strike — is fundamental, aren’t freedom of expression and freedom of religion — which many believe violated by Quebec laws — not just as important? ?
If Quebec’s methods may have inspired Mr. Ford, the special law he intends to have adopted by Friday risks setting a very bad example in turn for other governments that would face union demands that they consider excessive.
In Quebec, those of the common front in the public sector could exceed 23%, to take inflation into account. To hear the first vice-president of the CSN, François Enault, the action will not be lacking: “Good collective agreements are not only won at the bargaining table. It is won with mobilization. It’s won on the street. »
Those who think it is high time to get rid of a provision as contrary to Canadian values as the “notwithstanding clause” will not pay much attention to the Quebec difference. By aiming for black, why not take the opportunity to also shoot down white?