The Constitutional Right to Bargain Collectively: The Ironies of Labour History in the Supreme Court of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In June 2007 the Supreme Court of Canada held that the right to collective bargaining is a constitutionally protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms' guarantee of freedom of association. In so doing, they overruled a twenty-year old line of precedent that had rejected that very proposition. The court rested its current position of four grounds, one of which was that Canadian labour history supports the view that collective bargaining had become recognized as a fundamental right prior to the Charter. This article critically reviews the court's labour history and argues that it erroneously asserts that workers enjoyed a right to bargain that entailed a correlative duty on employers to negotiate in good faith prior to the passage of modern collective bargaining legislation during and in the aftermath of World War II. As well, it criticizes the court's method of selectively extracting passages from the work of labour historians while ignoring the critical insights their work provides. This enables the court to construct a highly romanticized and unrealistic story of the steady progress of labour law from repression to toleration to recognition, and to ignore weaknesses of the current regime of industrial legality, a thin version of which its decision protects. Finally, the paper considers the conditions for and implications of the court's ironic emergence as the defender of workers' collective rights against encroachments by the state at the turn of the twenty-first century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".