Conceptualizing Collective Bargaining under the Charter: The Enduring Problem of Substantive Equality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper has three goals. First, it attempts to understand how the Supreme Court conceptualizes the constitutionally protected right to bargain collectively in B.C. Health Services. It concludes that the Court has adopted a purely formal or procedural approach to collective bargaining. Although this conception may promote democratic deliberation by requiring governments to consult with the unions representing government employees who will be adversely affected by legislation that interferes with collective agreements, the paper concludes that it is disconnected from a broader, deeper and more secure normative base upon which to ground labour rights. Second, the paper argues that the Supreme Court’s dismissive treatment of the equality argument in the B.C. Health Services case is not only inconsistent with its decision in Newfoundland (Treasury Board) v. Newfoundland Assn. of Public Employees (NAPE), it both reflects and promotes an idea of equality that is directed at fighting stereotypes to the exclusion of fostering substantive equality. Third, the paper suggests that constitutional litigation in the labour context supports and reinforces partisan politics by promoting a form of aggressive adversarialism that is antithetical to a principled approach to developing labour policy for an economy for which the prevailing form of industrial pluralist labour law no longer fits.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".