Dear Editor:
For decades, contract negotiations for education employees occurred between local levels of education worker groups (CUPE, ETFO, OSSTF, etc.) and local school boards.
By 2012, the provincial government had changed this format, so that the provincial level of education worker groups would now negotiate directly with the provincial government.
During contract negotiations in 2012, the provincial government passed Bill 115, which outlawed strikes and lockouts, without offering any other process to resolve the stalemate between themselves and their workers. This forced education workers to take the deal that they were offering without any further negotiation.
In 2016, Ontario courts found that this bill was a violation of collective bargaining rights of educational workers. This finding was based on protections written into the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Fast forward to 2022. Ford’s government passed Bill 28, which will impose a four-year contract on 55,000 education support workers and prohibit striking for the life of the contract. And this time in order to block the workers’ right to take them to court, the provincial government is planning to invoke the Notwithstanding clause.
The Notwithstanding Clause, or Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, gives provincial legislatures the ability, through the passage of law, to override certain portions of the charter for a five-year term. It is not something that should be used lightly and certainly not to win a fight with your employees.
Our provincial government is saying to a group of citizens, here is the deal you are going to take and you have no say in the matter. No say because we will use legislation to block you from using long-fought-for and established portions of the negotiating process and because we are now willing to block you from addressing our actions within the legal system. The Ford government is willing to enact a rarely used part of the Canadian Constitution to win a contract negotiation.
Right now we have a majority government. That means that if the Ford government wants to pass a bill, it will be passed. So ask yourself, what other rights are covered by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? What other rights would this government be willing to trample in order to get what it wants? And are you certain that you would agree with everything they might want?
A precedent is being set, one that affects the rights of each citizen in this province, now and in the future.
Joanne Mitchell,
Fergus