Labour before the Law: The Regulation of Workers’ Collective Action in Canada, 1900-1948 by Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001, 398 pp., ISBN 0-19-541633-3.

When I studied Canadian collective bargaining law more than a quarter century ago, I learned how the 1944 war time executive order of the federal Government, known as P.C. 1003, ushered in the modern era of Canadian industrial pluralism. Upon the return of the nation to peace, it was left to the provincial legislators, who govern most private sector employment, to enact their own versions of collective bargaining statutes. However, writing broadly, there was a commonality in their approach. Employers were required to bargain with trade unions that obtained majority support in the enterprise or bargaining unit, and labour boards were established to oversee the certification of trade unions and good faith bargaining by the parties. Once collective agreements were entered into, the employer and the trade union were in most cases required to submit employee grievances over the administration and application of the collective agreement to binding arbitration, usually by a private arbitrator chosen by the parties. With the passage of more conservative legislation in the 1990s, and with the further integration of the Canadian economy into those of the United States and Mexico through the North American Free Trade Agreement, it does appear that industrial pluralism as I once perceived it is coming to an end. In large part, it appears that the economic conditions that enabled this form of collective bargaining to flourish are no longer part of the Canadian landscape. Over the last two decades and just as is the case with similar economies like Australia, Canada has witnessed: a partial erosion of its industrial base; a workforce no longer overwhelmingly employed on a permanent basis; the outsourcing of numerous functions to subcontractors; and the whole scale disappearance of protective tariffs. These economic and political changes have led to a contraction of pluralist industrial relations institutions and, sadly, now only one in five Canadian private sector workers is covered by a collective agreement. It is Canada’s slow abandonment of industrial pluralism which, in my view, makes this book of inestimable importance to Canadian labour law scholarship. This is because the monograph examines the manner in which the law regulated the collective action of workers before the advent of industrial pluralism, that is up to the making of P.C. 1003 in 1944. As the authors note in their concluding chapter, for many industrial relations and human resource management practitioners, all that came before the promulgation of P.C. 1003 is largely irrelevant. However, this book adduces sufficient evidence to convince me that without legislation enshrining the right of Canadian workers to engage in collective bargaining, interest arbitration or forms of independent worker representation, the law will inevitably revert to its time honoured traditions of protecting private property which is, and always has been, at the heart of our free enterprise economy. Professors Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker both teach labour law at the Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, and they have collaborated to produce this fine and timely book. While there is a long tradition of labour history scholarship, law books that chronicle modern legal history are surprisingly rare. Yet, it is only through an appreciation of 20th Century legal history that the utility of our current laws can be truly evaluated and this is why this volume is of seminal importance in the study of Canadian labour law. After a thoughtful introduction in which the authors show that the concept of “legality” always has been central to Canada’s legal discourse on collective employee actions, chapters 2 to 10 chronicle the role of Canadian law in quelling employee collective action and industrial disputation in …