Just before Christmas, the Supreme Court of Canada released a ruling that strikes down legislation banning agricultural workers from organizing unions. In a case between the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) and the Ontario government, the Supreme Court decided by a 8-1 vote that an Ontario labour law was unconstitutional.

The effect of the decision is that workers in the agriculture industry now have the right to freely choose to join a union. Alberta and Ontario were the only provinces to prohibit agricultural workers from unionizing. The Alberta government was an intervenor in the case on the side of the Ontario Conservatives.

"These restrictions are relics of the past and deserve to be swept away," says AFL president Les Steel. "There’s no reason why agricultural workers should not have the same rights as people working in other sectors of the economy."

Michael Fraser, Canadian Director of UFCW also welcomed the decision. "The court’s decision … means that agricultural workers can no longer be treated as an underclass, deprived of the basic right to organize enjoyed by other groups of workers."

In 1994, the previous NDP government in Ontario passed a law allowing the unionization of agricultural workers. After the election of the Conservative government in 1995, that law was repealed and the ban on unionization re-instated. In the year that the NDP law existed, three certifications were filed. Those certifications were cancelled by the Conservative action.

The UFCW challenged the law under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the right to association in the Charter.

In its decision, the Court stated that governments had an obligation to pass legislation protecting the right to unionize. "[A] posture of government restraint in the area of labour relations will expose most workers not only to a range of unfair labour practices, but potentially to legal liability under common law."

Applying this principle to agricultural workers, the justices said "that excluding agricultural workers from a protective regime contributes substantially to the violation of protected freedoms."

The court dismissed the Ontario government’s claims that the legislation was to protect the family farm. "The reliance on the family farm justification ignores an increasing trend in Canada towards corporate farming and complex agribusiness and does not justify the unqualified and total exclusion of all agricultural workers from Ontario’s labour relations regime" the decision stated.

The Canadian Labour Congress also intervened in the hearing.