The Conservative movement’s vast army of online trolls has been strangely silent about the right of poorly paid Ontario education workers to negotiate a decent salary for themselves.
Funny that, Conservatives being such lovers of Canadian rights and freedoms.
Ditto the right-wing politicians who took coffee and donuts to the thugs who occupied Ottawa and blockaded major border crossings last February while pretending to be the advocates of the little guy and the friends of the working class.
I’m pretty sure their teammate Doug Ford, premier of Ontario, is showing the true colours of the Canadian conservative movement with his plan to use Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the notorious Notwithstanding Clause, to impose a poor contract on the 55,000 members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and strip them of their legal right to strike.
On Sunday, after all, CUPE’s Ontario School Board Council of Unions gave the statutory five days’ strike notice, after which the educational assistants, custodians, early childhood educators and other workers could have legally walked off the job on Friday.
Everyone knows that’s the moment when the rubber hits the road in contract negotiations and often the best moment for working people forced to deal with a recalcitrant employer to get a fair agreement. That’s why it’s called bargaining.
So, presumably we can now expect continued silence from the likes of federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and perhaps adoption of the same strategy later if they are faced with public-sector negotiations in their own jurisdictions. That would be the Conservative way.
As for the foreign-funded “freedom” convoy crowd, their idea of freedom apparently doesn’t extend to collective bargaining unless it’s them trying to bargain with the Governor General and the Opposition parties to set up an unelected provisional revolutionary government in Ottawa.
I mention this only because sooner or later, probably sooner, the troll army is bound to be unleashed to accuse Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of hypocrisy for expressing reservations about Mr. Ford’s plan to use Section 33 to suspend parts of the Canadian Constitution he finds inconvenient after Ottawa used the Emergencies Act to end harassment of citizens, blockades of Canada’s border, and the attempt to overthrow the government.
The difference, which deserves to be analyzed and stated clearly, is that the right to bargain collectively is covered under what we think of as the rule of law, that is, the concept that all people must be treated equally according to the same legal standards.
Whereas, the “right” to occupy cities, harass their citizens, and overthrow democratically elected governments, however unpopular, is not.
Canadian courts have recognized that the right to bargain collectively is part of our constitutionally protected freedom of association. (This seems like a reasonable interpretation of an already recognized right to me, although there are those who would argue it’s an example of busybody judges inventing new rights. But that was always bound to happen, just as immature politicians like Mr. Ford were always sure to abuse it when they became too impatient to let the bargaining process work.)
In other words, the actions of the convoy insurrection defied the rule of law; the right of CUPE members to negotiate an agreement within a codified structure of labour relations defines it.
Our constitution, unfortunately, allows some of our fundamental rights to be suspended for the convenience of governments experiencing authoritarian impulses.
Whether or not this should have been part of the constitution is a subject for debate, but not much else. We’re stuck with the way things are.
Which leads us to the question of what needs to happen next.
Premier Ford did nothing to help Ottawa solve the convoy crisis and plenty to make it worse.
Presumably this was because he saw political advantage in making life difficult for Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals in Ottawa. That would explain why he skedaddled to his cottage and wasn’t heard from during the occupation while the Ontario Provincial Police twiddled their thumbs.
Now he wants to suspend the constitution for essentially the same reason: the political consequences of a short legal strike in Ontario’s schools by workers who were never declared to be essential and who made big sacrifices to keep schools open during the pandemic would be politically inconvenient for him and his government.
As a result, perhaps he will end up having to plead with the feds to use the Emergencies Act to end a general strike in Ontario.
That’s unlikely, of course, because many of the unions that would be required to join the brave CUPE workers are likely to find bureaucratic excuses to sit on their hands. Still, their members are pretty mad and yesterday the idea seemed to be gaining momentum.
Once in a while when you pull the cork from a bottle a genie pops out.
Now, wouldn’t it be a fine irony if that were to happen to Mr. Ford?
The thing is that Doug Ford and the PCs got a second majority government, because voter turnout was extremely low. However, despite that issue, people have regretted putting Doug Ford and the PCs back into power. It would be interesting to see how many conservative governments are left running the provinces and the territories in 5 years time. The way they are doing things, I don’t think we will see many of them endure. On the federal level, I still think the CPC won’t get back into power just yet. There are people who have no appetite for Reformers, and they have good reasons for thinking that way.
I don’t follow ON politics much but I surmise the ON NDP must be some form of tire fire – losing to Kathleen Wynne and Doug Ford is truly impressive, but losing to post-Pandemic Doug Ford, fresh off killing off Ontarians in droves during the pandemic and protecting the billionaires who killed their wealthy grandparents in LTC centers is amazing, and simultaneously losing to whichever hapless chump they dredged up to be the face of the Liberal party, indicates that maybe politics isn’t the right field for you.
Just wikipedia’d that election. The NDP took less of the vote than the Liberals. How is that even possible? The Wynne-led Libs would have lost if they were campaigning against anti-semitic butt cancer, that was only one election ago. If you’re losing these elections, which ones do you hope to win?
On a separate note, it’s both discouraging and scary to me that a provincial election (that’s the government responsible for health care) in the middle of a pandemic drew 43.53% voter turnout. How did 56.47% of Ontarians go through COVID and emerge too apathetic, alienated, nihilistic and/or downtrodden to bother voting?
Canada’s got BIG troubles. If you’ve got a few minutes, contemplate what I just told you, then read this:
https://www.studocu.com/en-us/document/boston-college/philosophy-of-the-person-i/the-devolution-of-regimes-and-souls/1944996
It’s point form, short and brief and describes Plato’s devolution of regimes (which should not be accepted as scientific fact but should be looked at as one of several flawed-but-useful ideas). Read that, then consider Ontario’s troubles juxtaposed against their voter turnout.
Big troubles.
Ford did play both sides very cleverly during the Ottawa protests. He started out making sympathetic noises to the protesters, then disappeared and went silent as it started to seem things were not going well. Perhaps forgetting Ottawa was in his province, the Ontario Provincial Police were of little or no help. Then finally he came out supporting the Federal government. He was quite the political chameleon and it seemed to work. No wonder he is trying to stay away as far as possible from the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act. Scrutiny is the last thing he wants. He would not come out of it looking good.
I don’t know how Ford’s abuse of the constitution on labour rights will turn out, but I have a feeling it will not go so well politically for him. First of all, the PM has had it with this Premier and a lot of people see this as an abuse of constitutional rules. Yes, Ford did get reelected recently, but he did not get a mandate to pull stuff like this.
Kenney’s mistakes on dealing with COVID led in part to the undoing of the previous Federal Conservative leader. This time it could be Ford putting his new Federal leader in a bad position.
Whatever happens, this abuse of the rules will most likely not be resolved legally. It will take political action, most likely a series of various actions to deal with it.
I’ve seen no evidence to support the idea that Canadians will punish politicians for taking away the rights of teachers to strike. Would be deliriously happy to be proven wrong though.
Except these workers are not teachers. They are educational support workers, like teaching assistants, custodians, and the like, and make the lowest wages in the school system.
Here in BC we recall Christy Clark, minster of Education in the newly-elected BC Liberal government: she tore up the BC teacher’s contract which they negotiated with the previous NDP government, that alone making it illegitimate in her and premier Gordon Campbell’s opinion, even though collective bargaining is a Charter Right.
The teachers’ union sued and won, although the BC Liberals’ sandbagging and appealing dragged the teachers’ inevitable victory out for almost a decade.
The diminished quality of education was all that nearly-complete cohort of K-12 students ever got. Meanwhile, Christy left politics to raise her newborn son and eventually become a right-wing talk-radio host. But before this long, long court case was done (which cost BC taxpayers tens of millions to watch their government defend the indefensible), Christy returned like a bad penny to win an upset party leadership victory just as the BC Liberals were being rocked by scandal. She was now an non-elected premier (here the parallels with non-elected Alberta premier Danielle Smith probably stop: Smith will likely win her by-election whereas Christy lost her own to then-rookie NDP candidate David Eby who, after winning two incumbencies, just became BC Premier by acclamation).
After several years away, Christy found the BC Liberal government had accumulated legal and popular opprobrium for many sins, even earning a few corruption convictions. And that darned old teachers’ suit was still in court. Seeking vindication from her own old sin, Christy deigned to appeal the appeal of the trial judge’s decision that tearing up a legal contract is unconstitutional. That earned her a severe judicial reprimand, her government a two million-dollar fine, and a court order to make restitution in pay and working conditions retroactively—a very expensive exercise of justice for the province of BC.
Conservatives were always suspicious of public education and school teachers. Tories regarded organization of public-sector unions a significant setback, and protection of collective bargaining in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms nearly the death knell for a polity purposely behind the times. Conservatives could only be resurrected as zombies in thrall to neoliberals who, in year-round Hallowe’en Tory costume, but not much in philosophy, can be styled “neo-rightists.”
The neo-right agenda is to diminish national sovereignty to the benefit of globalized corporatism in order to immunize profit against taxes and regulations democracies might elect to impose. ZombieCon proxies in legislatures are the principal saboteurs of principled democracy and rights. Labour unions, workers’ democracies in various sectors of the economy, have rights to collective bargaining enshrined in the Charter of Rights, rights the SCoC has upheld and should therefore be beyond partisan politics. But the notorious “notwithstanding clause” which allows legislatures to opt out of certain Charter rights is increasingly becoming the tool which neo-right governments use to pry enshrined rights back into the realm of parliamentary politics where demagoguery is deployed to rile the electorate against, say, unions or Aboriginals whose rights are protected in the Charter.
Unlike the USA (whence Canadian neo-rightists take their cues), the Canadian judiciary is non-elected in order to remain nonpartisan. The neo-right can rail all it wants about ‘activist judges,’ always alleging them to have liberal or socialist bias and who supposedly ‘create new rights’ derived from legal interpretation of the Constitution and its Charter, not from popularly-elected parliaments. But constitutions are meant to be beyond popular or partisan whim. Similarly, the HarperCons could insist all they wanted about the “supremacy of parliament”—naturally because that’s the forum where the neo-right can attempt ‘re-politicize’ rights which are properly outside of politics and, of course, of partisan neo-right politics which are the “politics” of systems-gaming.
That’s exactly what Ontario’s premier D’ohFo is trying to do by using the “notwithstanding clause” inappropriately: to incite popular anger against education workers themselves, not as a union with rights but as a threat to the people: he will style himself protector against supposedly unjust union demands, confusing as much as possible the difference between the actual wage raise demanded and the very right to bargain or strike. After two and a half years of Covid when his own government inflicted repeated, disrupting school closures, he wants to blame the results on workers who suffered a lot to keep kids educated and safe—and who’ve been plainly underpaid since even before Covid.
Since the wage issue is self-explanatory, D’ohFo wants to rile the decorate with a dummy issue. “Notwithstanding” is the dummy.
But there are always consequences. It might take years, like it did for Christy. Bad results compound when consequences from, for example, D’ohFo’s disruptive handling of schools during Covid (in comparison, BC kept schools open without interruption after a brief shut down at the very beginning of the pandemic) are addressed with more monkey wrenching —good money after bad, as ‘t were, or a lie to cover a previous lie and so on.
After four decades, two up and two down, the neo-right phenomenon is now so discredited it has to resort to flagrant abuse of systems generally called “the rule of law.” It’s zombies now include extremists who copy tRumpublicans’ more extreme systems-gaming, the full frontal attack on the most basic machinery of democracy.
But our system is mercifully less complicated, with fewer subsystems to game or outright sabotage. The US has a constitution designed to be unfair and easy for the powerful or demagogic to play. We have only the “notwithstanding clause,” and the abuses of it will expose culprits to consequences that probably won’t destroy our country.
But of course that’s considered unfortunate by the neo-right. That’s why it will double down on the only prybar it has and make out like the Constitution is in parliamentary bailiwicks neo-right zombieCons temporarily hold. And that the federation —a constituted thing if ever there was one— is at the mercy of mere living-dead in assemblies like Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.
Wait a minute! Saskatchewan? Oh, yes. Check out the Sask First Bill and that zombieCon government’s “quantification of harm” the feds allegedly do. Heck, the Paris of the Prairies is even going to amend its own “constitution.” Notwithstanding that it’s totally moot. Check it out!
It’s just that bad. It’s hard to know which story to report—an embarrassment of riches, no?
Your facts are facts and your memory is commendable… but you forgot to spit after you said the former BC Premier’s name.
Neil, it’s a good thing I didn’t have a mouthful of coffee…spfffffft..Waterton.
GUFFAWING, Thanks, I needed that…
On June 2, 2022 the voters of Ontario awarded Doug Ford 83 out of 124 seats in the Legislature. The cruel results of that super majority are being forced down the throats of the lowest paid workers in the Ontario education system.
Wouldn’t it be great if our electoral system wasn’t a cowardly dishonest cynical bad-faith mockery of the idea of democracy created to guarantee the well-being of a privileged minority at the unjust expense of an oppressed-yet-docile majority?
Freedom’s just another word to Doug Ford. Authoritarian leaders use a lot of words.
Did I mention several times already that the Alberta flag that went missing from the school in my community after the weekend surprise layoff of 20,000 custodians and educational assistants by the UCP in April 2020 is still missing? The maple leaf flies to this day.
The same analogy can be applied thusly …
Sometimes, the next time you pull the pin out of a grenade, an explosion pops out.
It’s a hard lesson, especially those for the hard of thinking. Time for yours, DohFo.
What I find odd was Doug Ford was all palsy with unions during the last election campaign. This struck me as very odd as Conservatives want nothing to do with unions other than to tear them down or apart, in favor of course of giving every last nickel to business owners and nothing to workers. Now that he got elected, well it’s a switch back to the usual ways. Political chameleon is a real fitting term here.
Old Albertan: Ford is selective about which unions he gets palsy with. This is part of a strategy used by all Conservative parties in Canada. He is friendly with private-sector building trades unions. He is hostile to public-sector unions. Divide and conquer. You’ll note that the UCP here in Alberta has made a similar effort to woo building trades unions while shutting out public-sector unions. This legislation has worried his private-sector friends in labour, though. Even LiUNA, whose officials campaigned with him, sent him a sharp letter, anyway. DJC
DJC, I regret to report a typo in your reply to Old Albertan. The word “palsy” comes up as “paralysis, often accompanied by involuntary trembling.”
Although…. Come to think of it, that might be how those union members Ford was cozying up to are feeling right about now.
Mike: You’re absolutely right on all counts. So what do you say we just leave it as it is, then? DJC
We hear this “divide & conquer” rhetoric more & more from conservatives these days. For example, this trope of “folks who shower after work, not before” — as though workers in the helping professions (like health care) and the tech sector, among others who are expected to maintain a certain standard of deportment and personal grooming in the workplace, don’t also work hard and thus are not also deserving of respect.
When “Right to Work” laws come, we’ll see which unions are blessed by our alt-right masters. Police unions are always exempted from those laws, for some reason.
Sad to me that anyone could claim to believe Canadian Conservatives aren’t ideologically anti-union. Knowing there are needlessly thirsty horses is distressing, but I’m getting really tired of going to all the trouble of leading them to water then watching them proudly walk off, still thirsty, into a desert.
And just to keep everyone on their toes (cpac) this morning..
Preston’s Manning says a not for profit company has been created to receive donations to support the ” citizen led inquiry into covid-19 response “”
Now where did I put that darned cheque book…
Why do I feel like we’re in the Tom Clancy book – the Enemy from within.*…
For those that are interested, a website is set up ” national citizens inquiry.ca ….
So they did a sample run in Toronto and 60 people came and had a say… videos available on the website.
“”Public opinion survey shows that 74% of Canadians said they were injured, they were harmed by the health protection measures to covid 19 …””.
“”2nd type of witness will be scientists and medical people who have an alternative narrative to the one that was put forward by the government, there’s alot of those people….””
Hmmm, ??alternative narrative
….shades of Kelly-Anne???
So, Preston,, Mr David Ross ( chartered accountant in NB, and Ottawa lawyer Andre Levshesenko(?) Are the 3 directors..
Sheesh, more homework!!
The Ford Government has invited a response from CUPE that they will not be happy with. Parents will not be happy.
But look at it from Ford’s perspective. They have recently been elected with a good majority. Four of five years to go. This will be buried in the mists of time by the time the of the next election.
But…..Danielle Smith has no such good fortune/ runway. Every wrong turn, and it seems every turn, will be one that is remembered at the polls and reminded to voters by the Notley team.
At the rate she is going Ms. Smith and her team will quickly become the butt of jokes by voters.
IMHO that, plus a close election will spell huge trouble for the UCP.
Use of the Emergency Measures Act by any gov’t, be it JT or hypothetically PP, would irrevocably destroy any pretense that Canada is a nation, rather than merely a criminal enterprise that exists to siphon wealth away from Canadians and towards billionaires.
So, Kory Teneyske, formerly Quebecor VP/ sun news/Harper spokesman &on DF’s campaign ( and now a seemingly regular on Power & Politics)…”
If you want to use children as a pawn in your labor negotiations …you’re going to get legislated back ,including use of the notwithstanding clause …you can take that to the bank cause it’s going to happen…* Twitter also..if one can trust what one sees there, darned, I forgot to look for a blue check mark..
Nope, nada, nothing to see here folks…and speaking of..K…
So the Liberals are jumping in because they don’t want to talk about the economy etc. etc ,yada yada…..this sounds eerily similar to the rhetoric coming from next door….
As my favorite sports broadcaster would say ” Oh My ” someone interrupting VC..well! Will wonders never cease ??and IMHO, he’s still “campaigning” for DoFo….
Time out for a head break, watch the game and try to pretend for 3hrs that everything is normal, hahaha, sigh!
Andrew Coyne claims there is an antidote to the Notwithstanding Clause:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-what-ottawa-should-say-to-the-provinces-see-your-notwithstanding/
Can anyone shed any light on the concept of ‘disallowance’?
Here are a few explanations of this concept:
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/disallowance
https://www.constitutionalstudies.ca/ccs-term/reservation-and-disallowance/?print=print-search
And the actual text of the Constitution Act, 1867 can be found here, if you want to explore it for yourself:
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/index.html
Having just recovered from the possibilities of your “Most Paused Scenes Ever” link supplied by “Kueez” to a sedentary lump commonly known as Doug Ford, where may I lay a claim to false representation ?
CovKid: Not here. Google, maybe.DJC
DJC, hey, hope you’re okay, my B-in-L, said there was over 340 police call outs,( first snowfall) 145 in Calgary, take care out there!!
Randi-lee: Lots of snow up here in Edmonton too. Spent the day at home sitting through an all-day Zoom meeting. A horrible experience, but better than driving. More snow tonight, so it’ll still be slippery in the morning. DJC
The thing about taking away the right to strike is that the “right” to strike is a construct which itself implies that strikes exist. Workers will strike. Legislation either permits it, or forbids it. Neither of those is a sufficient condition to either cause the strike, or stop it. Wildcat strikes are in many cases the reason public sector workers were given the “right” to strike. If you preempt bargaining and forbid strikes, you’re right back where you started – pissed off workers on strike.