The Labour Trilogy's Last Rites: B.C. Health and a Constitutional Right to Strike
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper traces the steps in the denouement of the Supreme Court of Canada's 1987 Labour Trilogy, which denied constitutional protection to collective bargaining and strikes. The first blow to those decisions came in Dunmore, where the Court adopted a collective rather than individual definition of the Charter freedom of association, while another was dealt by B.C Health, where the Court extended s. 2(d) protection to collective bargaining. The Supreme Court might still avoid finding a constitutional right to strike, but, in the author's view the Court has probably gone too far to turn back. If and when the time comes to read the Trilogy its "last rites," the author argues against setting a high threshold for a breach of s. 2(d), by adopting the "substantial interference" test set out in B.C. Health, in this respect, she points to an important difference between collective bargaining and strikes: the former is a positive obligation which imposes on governments a corresponding duty, whereas the latter is a negative entitlement to be free from government interference. While there is a risk that the constitutionalization of strike activity may involve the courts in reviewing labour policy, the solution is not to dilute the content of s. 2(d), but to create a "customized" s. 1 test for justifying infringements of the guarantee in the labour context - one which would explicitly defer to policy decisions by the legislature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".