How BC handled health care of migrant workers

Labour rights hang on Supreme Court ruling in Fraser Canadian Lawyer Magazine

In 2002, the British Columbia government introduced the Health and Social Services Delivery Improvement Act in an effort to defuse a perceived health-care crisis through provisions that enable employers to cut costs and increase operational flexibility through contracting out, layoffs, bumping, and job security.

“The legislation invalidated agreement provisions that conflicted with its provisions, precluded the parties from contracting out of the statute, and enacted a provision whereby the act prevailed over negotiated collective agreements,” notes Armstrong.In its decision in Health Services and Support-Facilities Subsector Bargaining Assn. v. British Columbia, the Supreme Court struck down the act, ruling the legislation “substantially interferes” with the procedural right to collective bargaining it deemed to be guaranteed by s. 2(d). The decision in essence overturned the jurisprudence that had arisen from the so-called “labour trilogy” cases in 1987 that found that s. 2(d) did not include a right to collective bargaining.In his essay, “The Freedom of Association Mess: How We Got into It and How We Can Get out of It,” University of Toronto labour law professor Brian Langille acknowledges the importance of the Dunmore and Health Services rulings, though he doesn’t agree with the latter being “widely hailed as a step forward for workers’ freedom of association