An Overview of Quebec Back-to-Work Acts Enacted between 1964 and 2001

The authors present a detailed account of each of the special acts that ordered people back to work, most of the time, employees according to the definition of the Labour Code (R.S.Q., c. C-27), or that ordered such employees to perform their usual tasks. Between 1964 and 2001, 34 such exceptional acts were adopted. The paper does not take into consideration legislative amendments enacted over the years to modify in a general manner the rules governing collective bargaining relations in the public and para-public sectors as well as within public services.In spite of the quite significant differences between the collective bargaining systems in place in Canada, especially as concerns the right to strike and the concept of essential services, such statistical data is evidence of a tendency to intervene more in the area of industrial relations in comparison with what occurs in other Canadian jurisdictions. A more detailed analysis of the rules in force elsewhere, especially in Ontario (24 special acts) and at the federal level (27 special acts) would explain these differences.As far as the areas affected by this type of legislative intervention are concerned, the data collected indicate that such areas of activity are especially those in which the State is often involved either as an employer or as a financial backer, even though other reasons for this exceptional type of intervention must not be neglected: the necessity of ending violence and the obvious intolerance of citizens deprived of a service that is not deemed essential according to the other legal criteria, are examples of this.From another perspective, the duration of the conflict is far from being in itself a decisive basis for intervention. From this point of view, we were able to establish that for public transit within the Montreal Urban Community, conflicts varying in duration between 2 and 22 days preceded the government’s decision to enact such special legislation. It was also possible to note such a time variation in the area of electrical services supply with strikes lasting from 10 to 22 days.It’s also useful to mention that if the use of such exceptional acts has diminished since the creation of the Conseil des services essentiels in 1982 (20 such acts were adopted between 1964 and 1982 as compared to 14 since 1983), we would be wrong to attribute the reduction in such periodic interventions to the sole existence of the Conseil. Other factors, such as the reduction of the number of work stoppages since 1983 in the public sector as well as the permanent measures provided for by the Act to ensure that essential services are maintained in the health and social services sector (R.S.Q., c. M-1.1) may also account for this phenomenon.Without giving any consideration to the social legitimacy of legislative intervention to terminate a labour conflict - real or apprehended - it must be admitted that the use of a special act in such situations is a sign of the failure of the free collective bargaining process, and that its repeated use runs the risk of undermining the authority of such laws. This instrument of social control involves a problem of public policy in the field of labour relations : how to conciliate certain international commitments, for example, ones made within the framework of the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work adopted in 1998, with the use of this unusual manner of conflict settlement, even when essential services are provided to the population?

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