Charter Challenge Defeats Government Appeal of Bill 124 Decision
Ford Government to Repeal Bill 124
February 13, 2024
Burlington, Ontario: HDEAA is pleased to share that Ontario’s Court of Appeal ruled yesterday to uphold the Superior Court’s 2022 decision striking down Bill 124 as unconstitutional. The Ford Government announced later in the day that the Ontario Government would act quickly to repeal the controversial Bill. The Charter Challenge HDEAA was part of has been successful in protecting your right to collective bargaining.
Passed in 2019, Ford’s Bill 124 capped public sector workers compensation increases to one per cent a year over three years. It fuelled both a staffing crisis across the broader public sector and a cost-of-living crisis for hundreds of thousands of workers across the province, especially in the Education and Health Care sectors.
In early November 2022, Ford hastily withdrew his government’s landmark Bill 28: Keeping Students in Class Act–just four days after it passed–following a decision by Ontario’s labour movement to launch province-wide strike action. In the midst of an ongoing strike by education workers, the threat of united action by other workers was enough to kill Bill 28.
Unionized workers won! The Ontario Court of Appeal decision upholds the Superior Court’s 2022 finding that Bill 124’s wage restraint measures were unconstitutional and unjustifiably interfered with the freedom of association guarantee under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Indeed, in its reasons, the Court of Appeal specifically emphasized the disproportionate adverse impact of Bill 124 on “women, racialized, and/or low-income earners, [who] have lost the ability to negotiate for better compensation or even better work conditions…”
Since the Superior Court decision, in many part of the broader public sector (including health, education, energy and the post-secondary sectors), arbitrators have awarded (and various unions and employers have negotiated) compensation increases above the one per cent cap in Bill 124, in recognition of the adverse impact of inflation on workers and the ongoing recruitment and retention crisis in many of these sectors.
Late last Friday afternoon, William Kaplan decided on the Remedy award sought by OSSTF and ETFO in our Education sector at an additional .75 % for 2019, .75% for 2020 and 2.75% for 2021 to be applied in addition to the 1% agreed to under Bill 124 at that time for their members.
HDEAA (as part of EWAO) will be negotiating our Remedy agreement and the timing of the award payment as part of our ongoing central negotiations with the province.