Reports of the Advisory Committee on Labour Management Relations in the Federal Public Service, Ottawa, Canada. First Report: Identifying the Issues/L’identification des enjeux May 2000, 60 pp., ISBN 0-662-64979-6. Second Report: Working Together in the Public Interest/Travailler ensemble dans l’intérêt public June 2001, 54 pp., ISBN 0-662-65583-4.

The appointment, in October1999, of a nine member Advisory Committee on Labour Management Relations in the Federal Public Service, with John Fryer as Chairman, reflected the concern of the Government of Canada over its strained relationship with the unions that represent its employees. While the system is considered to have generally worked well, in the first few rounds of bargaining after the enactment of the Public Service Staff Relations Act (PSSRA), the relationship between the parties began to deteriorate in the mid-1970s with the introduction of the first in a series of legislated wage restraint programs. The relationship deteriorated further in the following decades, with legislated interventions in the bargaining process almost becoming the norm. In the first of its two reports,theFryer Committee describes a labour relations climate of low morale and mistrust, exacerbated by years of suspended bargaining, salary and arbitration freezes and back-to-work legislation. The Report notes also that increased work loads resulting from ’downsizing,’ and a perception by many public servants of blocked career development are creating a problem of retention of younger employees in an already ageing work force, while the recruitment of additional ’knowledge workers’—professional, scientific and administrative—to meet the evolving requirements of government service can only be successful, in the face of competition from the private sector, if the Public Service can be seen as a better place to work. While recognizing the need for some differences in the statutory provisions for collective bargaining when a government is the employer, the Committee is highly critical of the PSSRA which, it points out, is far more restrictive than collective bargaining legislation in the private sector and more restrictive even than the legislation in most public sector regimes. Certification procedures, bargaining unit exclusions, scope of bargaining and arbitration, redress mechanisms, the designation procedure and mechanisms for the resolution of bargaining impasses are among the major problem areas identified in the first Report and on which the Committee recommended fundamental legislative/institutional changes in the second. These issues represent problems of long standing. Most have been identified in earlier studies. What distinguishes the Fryer Committee’s Report from other studies is the innovative recommendations it makes to deal with these problems and the new philosophy of labour relations in the Public Service that its recommendations represent. The title of the second report, Working Together in the Public Interest, reflects a fundamental shift in emphasis from the adversarial approach in the labour management relationship to date to an emphasis on joint problem-solving. While the Report supports the right of public service employees to unionize and bargain collectively, with the corollary right to strike, the new legislative framework it proposes makes express provision for consultation and co-development, at all levels of the labour management relationship, not as a minor adjunct to collective bargaining, but as a major component of that relationship. The Committee recommends transferring the general administration of the PSSRA to the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB). It would give that Board jurisdiction currently exercised by the Public Service Staff Relations Board (PSSRB) over certification, bargaining unit exclusions, unfair labour practices and the designation of services to be maintained during a legal strike, the provisions now in the PSSRA regarding these matters to be amended to mirror those in the Canada Labour Code. This would transfer to the jurisdiction of the CIRB matters that are not significantly different in the Federal Public Service than in the entities governed by the Canada Labour Code. The Committee found that scope of bargaining, mechanisms for redress of employee grievances and for the resolution of bargaining impasses are sufficiently unique to the …