The Role and Promise of International Law in Canada's New Labour Law Constitutionalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the landmark B.C. Health and Fraser cases, the Supreme Court of Canada draws upon international law which treats the right to bargain collectively as a key aspect of freedom of association in the workplace, and takes the position that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms should be understood to give as much protection to that right as is given by international instruments which Canada has ratified. In Fraser, the Supreme Court (in reversing the Ontario Court of Appeal) holds that the core elements of the current statutory framework of Canadian labour law should not be constitutionally entrenched as the only acceptable way to protect the right to bargain collectively. However, the Supreme Court does suggest that a legal duty to bargain, based to some degree on that duty as it exists today in Canada, is an indispensable element of freedom of association. A problem with that view, the author argues, is that the many component parts of the current system of Canadian labour law are too interdependent to allow courts to isolate specific features of it for constitutional entrenchment in a way that would both vindicate freedom of association and leave Canadian legislatures with enough leeway to adopt new policy approaches to the regulation of workplace relations in the light of changing circumstances. Because International Labour Organization (ILO) jurisprudence sees freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining as basic human rights which are able to coexist with a wide range of legal frameworks, it can provide a solid foundation for the development of Canada’s new labour law constitutionalism. Some aspects of the ILO jurisprudence (such as some of its very tight restrictions on the imposition of alternatives to strikes) may, the author suggests, be ill-suited to the Canadian context, but most of it fits quite well with the existing Canadian model, and any problematic aspects can be managed within already established doctrinal structures of Canada’s new labour law constitutionalism.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.030 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 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".