Agricultural Workers and Collective Bargaining: Part Deux

The United Food and Commercial Workers were before the Ontario Court of Appeal yesterday arguing that the Charter protects the right of agricultural workers to engage in collective bargaining.  The main challenge is to the Agricultural Employees Protection Act, which was the Conservative government’s response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Dunmore.  Recall that Dunmore found that the Ontario Labour Relations Act’s exclusion of agricultural workers from the protections against employer anti-union discrimination  interferes with the rights of those workers to unionize and make collective representations to the employers about workplace conditions.  
The UFCW is arguing that the Agricultural Employees Protection Act still fails to protect the “freedom of Association” of the workers.  They lost that argument in the lower court.   However, since that lower court decision, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Health Services, in which it ruled that the Charter actually does protect a right to collective bargaining.  So now the issue is whether the AEPA protects the right to collective bargaining as that right was defined in Health Services.  Are you following this?
But leaving all of this law stuff aside for a moment, why do you think that the Ontario government persists in excluding agricultural workers from the Labour Relations Act?  You can find the answer in the Dunmore decision.  The government argues that agriculture as an industry is “different”, and that employees in that industry ought not to have the same rights as other workers.  Not suprisingly, the ILO has chastised this argument (search case number 1900) in ruling that the exclusion violates Convention 87, which Canada ratified in 1972.  Do you agree with the government’s arguments in this case justifying differential treatment of agricultural workers?