Edmonton Employment Law

 For over a year, I've been commenting on iterations of the proposed 'Alberta Sovereignty Act' -  the cornerstone of the totalitarian coup that is the Free Alberta Strategy , and  the centerpiece of Danielle Smith's leadership campaign that put her in the Premier's office . All previous commentaries are exclusively reliant on descriptions, for public consumption, of what it is and does. Yesterday, Bill 1 was tabled, and we get to see for ourselves: Does the Alberta Sovereignty Act actually purport to give the Legislature authority to resist Federal exercises of their lawful jurisdiction? Or is it a symbolic waste of ink that empowers the Legislature only to...keep whining? The verdict: While it still doesn't give us clarity of what kinds of actions they're contemplating to try to 'shield' Albertans from Federal laws, it's clear that the operation of this bill is unconstitutional and outrageously anti-democratic. The Basics: Separation and...

 A couple days ago, I posted a primer on the right to bargain in Canada . I've also gotten involved in some Twitter discourse about it among other lawyers (mainly from outside the labour discipline), and quite frankly Twitter's not well-suited to the discussion. So this is a bit more advanced. But the thing I want to be absolutely clear about is this: None of this is necessary to find Bill 28 objectionable . This analysis is abstract, talking about the extent of the obligations and limits that s.2(d) puts on government legislation. However, once you accept that s.2(d) has ANY collective bargaining content at all, it's a very short step from there to "government can't legislatively impose collective agreements without infringing 2(d)". The outer limits deal more with government regulation of private sector bargaining relationships - whether or not the Charter imposes a positive obligation on governments to require employers to bargain in good faith, or to reins...

 With the Doug Ford government in Ontario controversially invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to pass labour legislation forcing new collective agreements on school workers and prohibiting strike actions on threats of hefty fines, it's worth a look at exactly why  he needs to use the NWC in this context. There are conservatives arguing that this is all about the 'right to strike' - a right that was only recognized relatively recently (2015), and which earlier generations of the Supreme Court rejected. So the argument goes that an activist court recognized a dubious proposition, and all that the NWC does in Ontario's Bill 28 is override that new and doubtful right. That's wrong on just about every level . Bill 28 does much more than override the right to strike, but rather overrides rights to bargain in ways that successive courts have recognized for decades. In fact, the content of its strike prohibition is so broad that it probably infringes even the earliest and n...