Rights denied in Northern Saskatchewan

It's clearly unconstitutional, but there it is in Saskatchewan's Labour Standards Act regulations-an exemption that allows employers to escape paying overtime to workers in the northern third of the province.

Section 7 of the regulations, which were last updated in 1995, exempts companies located north of the 62nd township, an area that begins just north of the city of Prince Albert, from paying time-and-a-half when employees work more than an eight-hour day or a 40-hour week.

Three municipalities located in the designated area are not included in this exemption.

Since workers in the south-and in the northern communities of La Ronge, Creighton and Uranium City-get paid for working overtime, the equality provisions of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms are very definitely violated by this arrangement. Former Member of Parliament Rick Laliberté circulated a petition asking Saskatchewan's New Democratic Party government to do something about it.

But, to his surprise, it took quite awhile to get any action even though, in his petition, he asked the government to have this matter dealt with by Jan. 1, 2005, in time for the beginning of Saskatchewan's centennial year.
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Only now, more than a year later, is anything being done and what's being done is still a far cry from the legislative reform needed to eliminate the discrimination against northern workers. Bill Craig, spokesman for Labour Minister David Forbes, told Sage on March 8 that the matter is being reviewed.

"The department has been asked by the minister to do a detailed examination of this file. We're conducting that examination right now and expect to have a report to the minister shortly," he said.
The minister will have the report in his hands fairly soon by bureaucratic standards.

"Probably not more than three to five weeks, in terms of a review to the minister and consulting with other departments and the due diligence that is typical," Craig said.

Laliberte, a former NDP and then Liberal MP, is now working as an apprenticeship coordinator for a Metis employment and training agency in Beauval. He finds it strange that a provincial government would not be eager to update legislation that is discriminatory.

"I thought the province and especially our northern leaders would jump on it but they haven't," he said. "It discriminates against workers in the north. The northern people are getting the shortest end of the stick. If you look at the whole Canadian map, this is the only region where there's no overtime provision in this country now."

He suggested that the province benefits from this unequal treatment of northern workers.

"The province has been getting away with saying they've left it to the companies. That's what their standard line has been up to now. What happens is the biggest users of this-or abusers, I should say-is the provincial government itself because of the forest fire policy. If a forest fire starts in Big River, the firefighters there get overtime. But if it's in Dore Lake, 50 miles north, they don't get overtime," he said.

Some workers are losing 20 hours of pay per week with typical wages varying from $12 an hour for an apprentice to $25 an hour for a journeyman. And Laliberte estimates that 60 per cent of the workers who are affected by this are Aboriginal.

"The one's that really get hit on are the lower end paying jobs, the catering jobs, the laborer jobs-no overtime. And it's racial based too because you can say the north as a whole but then they leave La Ronge, Creighton and Uranium City out and those are the predominantly non-Aboriginal cities," he said.

Laliberte thinks there's something going on here because the government has taken so long to act on a fairly straightforward matter of equality rights. He said the president of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour told him his organization has been calling for action on this issue for 10 years.

"The province is too smug with it. There's got to be some under the table deal there. Otherwise some champion would have arisen," he said.

But the exemption stands out glaringly against all other Canadian jurisdictions, he added.
"When you looked at it by geography, we were the only ones. I think it's time to change it."