It may be a tad premature for the B.C. government to pop the champagne bottles to celebrate its recent huge win in its long-running feud with the B.C. Teachers’ Federation.
While the B.C. Court of Appeal delivered a devastating setback to the union, there is a good chance the highest court in the country will hear the case and perhaps render a different verdict.
The strongly-worded appellate court ruling demolished the earlier judgment of B.C. Supreme Court Justice Susan Griffin, faulting her for all kinds of legal errors. But it wasn’t an unanimous ruling, as one justice – Ian Donald – wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion.
That lone dissent may be enough for the Supreme Court of Canada to agree with the BCTF’s request for an appeal. That, and the high court’s recent interest in cases that involve collective bargaining issues.
And that is what this fight between the government and the union is all about: bargaining rights, and how far they extend.
A key point is this: once something is put into a government’s collective agreement with a public sector union, is it there forever if the union refuses to take it out?
That, in a nutshell, is where this long-running dispute originates. More than a decade ago, the B.C. Liberals removed language in its contract with the BCTF that determined class size limits and therefore how many teachers needed to be hired.
The language had been put there by the previous NDP government, and the B.C. Liberals government felt it should not be bound by what it considered to be a rigid, expensive system that didn’t work properly and was provided by the previous government as a gift for a union ally.
The union sued and won. The government tried a different tack, and brought in legislation aiming at fixing the problem, but Justice Griffin ruled it to be insincere and phony, and therefore a case of bad faith bargaining.
She ordered the old, stripped-out language to be restored to the contract (which came with a cost of at least $300 million a year), and the government had no choice but to appeal such an expensive ruling.
Now, the question may well be: if the Supreme Court of Canada hears the case, will it back the appellate judges, or will it agree with Griffin’s take on things?
But it could be two years before the Supreme Court of Canada rules on this, assuming it agrees to hear the case at all.
The Court of Appeal ruling may have taken the wind out of the BCTF’s sails, but things will be far from smooth sailing in the education system for quite a while to come.
Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global B.C.
