I leave the on-line world for a day, and all hell breaks loose. First, the Back to Work legislation is passed and the York strike is officially over (OK, I knew that one was coming). We await the appointment of the arbitrator. Second, CUPE announces it has changed its mind about launching a Charter challenge to the legislation. I’m not sure if they, or the Canadian Labour Congress plans on filing an ILO complaint.
Third, the OC Transpo strike that began on December 10 has ended. The parties agreed to send the dispute to interest arbitration after the Federal government threatened to pass back to work legislation. Interestingly, the threat of the government to order back to work legislation, and the agreement of the parties to voluntarily refer the dispute to arbitration under the shadow of the threat of that legislation, came the same day as the Chair of the CIRB reported to the Minister of Labour that there was no threat of immediately safety concerns to the public were the strike to continue, as reported in this CBC story:
On Jan. 28, the Canada Industrial Relations Board ruled that the transit strike did not pose an immediate or serious danger to public health and safety, and essential-services agreements between the city and the union did not need to be revised to maintain a level of regular transit service.
The board had been asked by the labour minister to look at the agreements and had made its decision based on more than 3,000 submissions from the public and the two sides in the dispute.
Not clear why the Chair was asked by the government to go through the exercise of reviewing submissions from 3000 people and to prepare a report on the threat to the public of a continued strike when the report would be completely ignored by the Minister.
The big question now is, what are we going to talk about on Doorey’s Workplace Law Blog now with all this damn labour peace? Fear not, loyal readers, there will always be material….
