Welcome to the Wild, Wild West
In January of 2002, the provincial government imposed a contract on the province's forty-three thousand public school teachers some six months after the expiry of the previous agreement and unsuccessful attempts at negotiating. A number of provisions of the imposed settlement angered teachers but perhaps the most contentious clauses removed any reference to establishing class size limits or minimum service levels within the teachers' contract [http://www.bctf.ca/bargain/agreements/pr... ]. Briefly speaking, the law that imposed the contract in essence made it illegal to include provisions relating to class sizes and service levels and other associated "cost" items in any collective agreement. To ensure those provisions were met, the government then hired an arbitrator to review each and every local collective agreement to strip them of any reference to cost items.
The BC Supreme Court, however, determined the government's interpretation of what it could and could not remove from contracts was invalid, effectively quashing all of the questionable revisions made by the government's arbitrator.
Most governments, those that were democratically elected anyway, when told by their own Supreme Court that its actions constitute "errors of law that are of such fundamental importance to a correct determination of the issues put to arbitration" [http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/sc/0... ] would, one presumes, alter its actions so they conform to the court's judgment.
Or, if you're the BC Liberals, you simply re-write the law your actions were violating so you can continue your plans without the pesky interference of the judicial system.
Most recently, the provincial government, having already reneged on its contractual obligations in its previous agreement with the province's Hospital Employee's Union, enacted legislation not only ending the HEU's job action, but retroactively reducing the employees' wages by fifteen percent, in essence telling the unionized workers they will be ordered back to work and will owe their employers money.
By this morning (April 30), not only had HEU members defied back to work legislation imposed on them, union workers throughout the province have stopped just short of declaring all-out war on the provincial government, including CUPE, the province's largest public sector union, announcing a complete walkout of all of its members in protest for the following Monday. Some pundits are even beginning to muse aloud about the possibility of a general strike, unheard of in BC for more than twenty years.
It really isn't the kind of national and even international publicity the province needs at this point in its less than stellar
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