A “Unique Experiment”: The Ontario Labour Court, 1943–1944

Introduction

The Ontario Collective Bargaining Act of 1943 created the first system of compulsory collective bargaining in the province, establishing a labour court presided over by justices of the Superior Court. This experiment in industrial relations lasted less than a year and has been described as a “minor institution.”¹ However, while its existence was indeed brief, the Ontario Labour Court was nonetheless more than an unimportant “blip” in Canadian labour history: for the first time in Ontario’s history, trade unionism was meaningfully legitimized through compulsory collective bargaining. In addition, for better or worse, the Ontario Collective Bargaining Act provided the framework for the industrial relations scheme that remains active to this day.

This paper examines the formation and operation of the Ontario Labour Court within the context of wartime labour relations and evaluates the court’s legacy to labour relations in the province using a variety of archival sources.² It investigates the social and political circumstances that spurred the provincial government to pass legislation in many ways similar to the United States’ Wagner Act, which preceded the Ontario labour relations innovations by almost a decade and created a court rather than a board.

The paper also assesses general trends in the court’s functioning through specific case studies, with a special focus on two aspects of the court that garnered criticism. The first of these critiques was of the Ontario Labour Court’s character as a branch of the common-law court system, which was viewed by some as an impediment to the administration of successful labour relations. The second was the Ontario Labour Court’s inability or refusal to adequately deal with what union leaders termed “company unions.” This analysis suggests that there was in fact some fuel for these two critiques, but that the variance in court decisions and the difficult context in which the court operated create a more complicated picture. For example, the court’s legal identity led to mandatory representation by lawyers, which was highly unpopular with unions, but there is also evidence to suggest that the same legalism lent the court greater acceptance and therefore less employer backlash. Similarly, though there are unquestionably cases where the court aided, or at least did not sufficiently discourage, company-influenced employee associations, there were also times where the court’s decisions and procedures allowed historic shifts from employee representation within company councils to bona fide international unions.

In addition, attention is paid to the people who inhabited the court: who they were, their perspectives, the way they interacted with the court, and how the existence of the court may have affected the expansion of careers available for them and their successors. Finally, based on such investigations, I argue that the Ontario Labour Court’s creation was an important event in Canadian labour history, and that, while its work had mixed benefits, it nonetheless greatly influenced the kinds of labour relations that have remained with us ever since.

Context: Labour, Government, and the War

The well-known labour lawyer and academic Bora Laskin stated in 1944, “Today a man can speak favourably in public of union recognition and collective bargaining and still be considered respectable. Yet it is hardly open to dispute that we entered this war with a system of labour relations that showed little, if any, advance over that in vogue in 1914.”³ Created during turbulent times, the Ontario Labour Court was a product of the political, social, and economic climate on the home front during World War II.

When Canada entered the war, the federal government had control over most of Canada’s industry due to the War Measures Act. Discrimination against union members and leaders was legal and widespread,⁴ and often common-law remedies were still sought during labour disputes, especially by employers. When the government did intervene in such disputes, it was often to protect management’s interests over workers’ rights, as Premier Mitchell Hepburn’s actions attest in response to the 1937 General Motors strike. As Laskin stated, labour disputes were regulated in...