View cases - Stewart McKelvey

wrong in the past to exercise “judicial restraint in interfering with governmentregulation of labour relations”. But, without any clear prescription in the Charter,there is much to be said for leaving the regulation of labour relations to electedlegislative bodies (and the sanction of the ballot box). [p. 44-8][228] As Professor Langille points out, examination of the different labour relationsregimes of the roughly 180 that compose the International Labour Organization (“ILO”), revealsa range of ways a government might choose to structure labour relations: see B. Langille, “Why2011 SCC 20 (CanLII)Are Canadian Judges Drafting Labour Codes – And Constitutionalizing the Wagner Act Model?”(2009-2010), 15 C.L.E.L.J. 101, at p. 107. By way of illustration, bargaining betweenemployers’ associations and trade unions is entirely voluntary in Germany; specifically, there isno obligation on employers’ association to bargain in good faith, as there is in North Americanlabour relations regimes: see generally K. G. Dau-Schmidt, “Labor Law and Industrial Peace: AComparative Analysis of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan Under theBargaining Model” (2000), 8 Tul. J. Int’l & Comp. L. 117.[229] More fundamentally, the fact that the Wagner model of collective bargaining iscurrently the dominant mode of resolving labour relations issues today does not mean that thiswill always be the case. Peter A. Gall sounded this note of caution in the early years of theCharter:Collective bargaining is extremely important in our society and has been for sometime now. But will it always be so? Can we confidently predict that 50 or even 20years from now collective bargaining will still be the primary activity of tradeunions? Or will we have adopted some other technique for setting terms andconditions of employment, such as full-scale interest arbitration or greater relianceon legislated standards. If we cannot reject this out of hand, and I do not think we