ONA's Constitutional Challenge of HLDAA - Queen's Park press conference

Ontario’s nurses and health-care professionals—members of ONA—have announced an historic constitutional challenge that aims to strike down a decades-old law that strips them of fundamental rights to meaningful collective bargaining, including the right to strike, and guts their bargaining power. ONA’s legal action targets the Hospital Labour Disputes Arbitration Act (HLDAA), a 1965 statute that is among the most restrictive labour relations regimes in the world. Enacted before the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms existed, it applies a blanket ban on any form of job action for all nurses and health-care professionals working in hospitals and long-term care homes. This amounts to more than 90% of health-care workers in Ontario. “For decades, this law has stripped nearly all health-care workers in Ontario of fundamental constitutional rights” said ONA Provincial President Erin Ariss, RN. “HLDAA has created a bargaining system where employers can easily sidestep meaningful collective bargaining. It is a process that denies freely negotiated agreements and improvements to the poor working conditions of our members, who deliver valuable care to patients across Ontario. When this happens, the public-health care system falls further behind. HLDAA forces collective bargaining disputes into binding arbitration, which removes the leverage workers rely on to secure fair agreements and systemic changes. Under this regime, employers can routinely avoid negotiated agreements, relying on arbitrators to impose contracts. The Ontario Hospital Association has failed to meaningfully bargain with a solution-focused approach to enter a freely negotiated settlement with hospital nurses in more than 15 years. Instead, binding arbitration has been the relied-upon method of choice sought by these employers, shutting down open communication and a collaborative interest-based approach to collective bargaining. “The tipping point came last year when an arbitrator imposed a new hospital contract that completely ignored the top demand of more than 60,000 nurses – to implement mandatory minimum nurse-to-patient ratios,” Ariss says. “Ontario nurses are beyond angry that our constitutional right to take any kind of job action to improve working conditions and patient care is restricted. That’s why we are fighting to restore our rights and strike down HLDAA.” Nurses and health-care professionals in most of Canada – and in many countries around the world – have the right to take some job action including a limited right to strike while maintaining essential patient care. Arbitrator decisions in Ontario have largely reinforced the status quo and have consistently failed to address systemic issues like understaffing. “The status quo is broken, benefitting the Ford government and employers who are more concerned with profits than safe and accessible public health care. As we face unprecedented challenges, nurses and health-care professionals are fighting to restore our rights so we can use our collective bargaining power to fight for better public health care for everyone.” See the media release: https://ona.org/news/20260511-hldaa-c... #onlab #onpoli #fightlocal