In which the BC NDP thwart the government lawyers' attempt to create their own bargaining unit
It has been a bizarre experience listening to B.C.'s political parties debate a bill that would trample the unionization rights of the province’s in-house lawyers.
“It’s kind of like the Twilight Zone in here right now, frankly,” said BC Green MLA Adam Olsen, who stood to speak to the bill Thursday. “They're meant, or they at least fashion themselves, as the workers' party, a labour party, and yet this is what we're doing with our own public servants.” The BC NDP knows this well, because the party has fought for this very thing for decades. Now, in its sixth year in power, it has suddenly become inconvenient to live up to those ideals.
The only New Democrat to attempt to defend Bill 5 has been Environment Minister George Heyman, a former three-term president of the BCGEU, who cashed in all his union credentials and then some on the floor of the house Thursday to try and turn the narrative. “Let's be absolutely clear. You can't pick and choose that you're going to give one group the ability to organize a separate union outside of the Public Service Labour Relations Act, but somehow deny it to other groups. Life and the law do not work that way.”A previous BC NDP government in the late 1990s learned this the hard way when they went toe-to-toe with more than 300 Crown prosecutors during contract negotiations that sparked multiple days of strikes and shut down courts.
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