In this accomplished study, Charles Smith and Larry Savage offer readers an admirable perspective on the relationship between organized labor and the Canadian legal system. While the book examines nearly two hundred years of interactions between the Canadian courts and unions, it focuses primarily on how the Charter of Rights and Freedoms transformed the way organized labor and the legal system viewed one another and how the tactical approach of unions evolved in light of new political, social, economic, and legal contexts. Simply put, Smith and Savage demonstrate that throughout most of Canadian labor history, the courts have looked at unions as a conspiratorial threat, and labor has perceived the justice system as unwilling to promote the rights of working people because it was ideologically aligned with the forces of private property.
This carried forward throughout the twentieth century into the debates surrounding the Charter in the early 1980s, when...
