Farm employer group ‘delighted’ by Supreme Court ruling

by SUSAN MANN

Ontario’s Agricultural Employees’ Protection Act is constitutional, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled.

The decision, released Friday, elated a group that represents farm employers and disappointed the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Canada (UFCW), which argued for years the provincial Act was unconstitutional because it doesn’t require employers to bargain over wage and job conditions and lacks a mechanism to resolve labour disputes.

The Ontario Appeal Court ruled in favour of the union’s argument in November 2008. The province appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in December 2009.
 
“We’re officially delighted with the ruling,” says Ken Forth, chair of the agricultural industry’s Labour Issues Coordinating Committee of Friday’s decision.

One justice disagreed with the majority decision but Forth says that’s not a concern. “That’s always the case. That’s why they have nine judges. Eight-to-one is a pretty big win.”

“Farmer workers in Ontario are entitled to meaningful processes by which they can pursue workplace goals,” says Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Mr. Justice Louis LeBel in the 8-1 majority written decision posted on the Supreme Court’s website Friday morning. The right of an employees’ association to make representations to their employer and have their views considered in good faith is “a derivative right” under a portion of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and is necessary to the meaningful exercise of the right to free association. The provincial Act, established in 2002, “provides a process that satisfies this constitutional requirement,” the majority of the justices say in the written decision.

The province isn’t required to provide a particular form of collective bargaining rights to agricultural workers “in order to secure the effective exercise of their association rights,” the justices wrote.

Madam Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, the court’s sole dissenting voice, wrote that the Act doesn’t “protect and was never intended to protect collective bargaining rights.”

Stan Raper, spokesman for UFCW Canada, called the Supreme Court’s decision that Ontario’s Act met the freedom to associate portion of the Canadian Charter, “bad news.”

Madam Justice Abella was the only voice of reason, he says.

Sarah Petrevan, spokesperson for Ontario Agriculture Minister Carol Mitchell, says, the court has endorsed the Act and “so we value that decision.”

Raper says there’s nothing to stop the provincial government from changing the current law to one “that provides basic protection for farm workers.” He says the union will now focus on convincing the province to make the change.

The court has endorsed a portion of the union’s argument that collective bargaining rights were secured in Canada by a previous court decision in British Columbia involving public health workers, he adds. BF