CollingwoodToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter was submitted to OrilliaMatters.com.
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In a letter to the editor shortly after Doug Ford took power (his first election), I warned that he was using the notwithstanding clause in an entirely inappropriate manner.
The Ford government is now using the notwithstanding clause as a bludgeon to wipe away rights established by the Charter and confirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada.
As a lawyer, I am aware that the jurisprudence on the notwithstanding clause is limited. However, a study of the history of the creation of the clause and the opinions of most recognized legal scholars leads to the inescapable conclusion that it was never intended to be used in a labour dispute to pre-emptively wipe out the rights of the people you are supposedly negotiating with in good faith.
If you are not involved, should you be concerned? If the government will act in this manner against the lowest-paid people in the education system (whose wages have fallen way below inflation rates for years and are more than 70 per cent women), don’t you think they might do it to you? Any right you have can be wiped away with no recourse. What this government is doing is just political manoeuvring to pit school workers against parents.
Shame on them for trying to blame these lowest-paid education workers for the closing of the schools.
Don Crawford
Orillia
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