On May 16, 2022, President Carr and PIPSC negotiator Pierre Ouellet appeared before the Manitoba Legislature’s Standing Committee on Justice on the repeal of the province’s Public Services Sustainability Act (PSSA).
The PSSA is a particularly nasty example of legislation that imposes wage restraints and restricts collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of hard-working public servants.
The move to repeal the PSSA follows tremendous pressure from unions and workers, including PIPSC.
PIPSC represents over 150 members in our Manitoba Association of Government Engineers (MAGE) Group and has always kept a close eye on the labour situation in the province.
It’s our view that the PSSA violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as Canada’s human rights obligations under international law, without reasonable justification.
While we are pleased that this law is on the road to being repealed, it’s critical that moving forward, no government in Canada be able to use legislation to interfere with the process of meaningful collective bargaining, as protected under section 2 of the Charter.
There has been a lot of back and forth in the courts on whether or not legislated wage freezes are constitutional under the law – and we fully support the Manitoba Federation of Labour’s action to bring this question before the Supreme Court of Canada. It needs to be answered once and for all.
We urge the Manitoba government (as well as all governments) to:
- Stop interfering in public sector bargaining
- Not oppose the application made by the coalition of unions (representing over 100,000 provincial employees) to have the Supreme Court consider the constitutionality of wage-freeze legislation.
- Support education around the constitutional rules of collective bargaining for public sector workers and the wider public