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View cases - Stewart McKelvey

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to make brief oral representations, but said it had no obligation to bargain towards a collectiveagreement. The meeting lasted 15 minutes.[334] In the years since the AEPA was enacted in 2002, there is no evidence of a singlesuccessfully negotiated collective agreement or even of any negotiations. I appreciate thatstatutory interpretation does not draw on the perceptions of the statute’s intended consumers, butwhere, as here, there is perfect harmony between statutory language, legislative intention, and2011 SCC 20 (CanLII)public perception, the usual interpretative tools are vindicated.[335] In addition to finding a violation of s. 2(d) based on the explicit failure, by text andby design, to include even a hint of a process of collective bargaining, let alone a duty to engagein meaningful and good faith efforts to arrive at a collective agreement, I also agree with WinklerC.J.O. that for agricultural workers, the absence of a statutory enforcement mechanism and ofmajoritarian exclusivity is an infringement of s. 2(d).[336] Health Services recognized that s. 2(d) of the Charter obliged the state, either asemployer or as legislator, to protect the process of collective bargaining (para. 88). The contentof that protection will of course mean different things in different contexts. The determinativequestion will inevitably be, as Bastarache J. said in Dunmore, what protections are “essential” tothe “meaningful exercise” of the right.[337] The right at issue in Dunmore was the right to organize. Bastarache J. concludedthat this required ancillary protection for the freedom to assemble, to participate in the lawful

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