Rights denied in 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 overtime, the equality provisions of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms are very definitely violated by this arrangement. Former Member of Parliament Rick Laliberte circulated a petition asking Saskatchewan's New Democratic Party government to do something about it.

But, to his surprise, it took quite a while to get any action even though, in his petition, he asked the government to have this matter dealt with in time for the beginning of Saskatchewan's centennial year, Jan. 1, 2005.

Only now, more than a year later, is anything being done and what's being done is a far cry from the legislative reform needed to eliminate the discrimination against northern workers. Bill Craig, spokesman for Labour Minister David Forbes, told Windspeaker on March 8 that the matter was 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.

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 labourer 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," he said.
Ile-a-la Crosse Mayor Max Morin sees this situation at the ground level every day in his northern Saskatchewan town.

"It's a discriminatory policy. Most of the people living outside of La Ronge, Creighton and it used to be Uranium City but Uranium City is just a small unorganized settlement at this time because most people moved out of there, are First Nations or Metis people. The government of the day in Saskatchewan made regulation under the labour law saying that people operating in these communities, contractors coming in, don't have to pay overtime," he said. "We have a general contractor building a high school and a health centre in Ile-a-la Crosse and I asked him that specific question. After a 40-hour week are you going to be able to pay overtime if they work 50 or 60 hours a week? They said, 'No, we don't have to pay overtime according to the legislation.'"

He was aware that the province was looking into the matter but he hadn't received any assurances that anything would be done.

"We wrote letters to the minister of Labour and so far I don't know what the process is. They've indicated they were going to look at it but they haven't indicated if they were going to change it or not," he said.

The lack of overtime is an everyday problem faced by people in the north.

"A lot of people are losing income. I know a lot of people are working 10- or 12-day shifts and they're putting in 10-hour days. So they're working 120 hours but they're just getting straight time when they should have getting at least 40 hours of overtime for at least time-and-a-half. I'll use Alberta as an example. A lot of our people work in the oil sector over there and after 40 hours they get overtime," he said.

Did he believe the policy was originally directed specifically at Aboriginal people?

"That's my first perception of it. I don't know why they made that policy. They're trying to use the scenario that we have a lot of mines operating in the north and maybe they tried to make exemption for the mines. But the mines are making millions and millions of dollars. Why would they want that exemption?"