[TURC] Historic Supreme Court ruling strengthens workplace justice - Death of Pierre Verge
- From: Murray Gregor <gregor.murray@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "turc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <turc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2015 23:21:40 +0000
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>
>Dear TURC List Readers,
>
>The post by Andrew Jackson yesterday on the recent Supreme Court decision
>(Sask. Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan) prompts me to share with you
>the sad news of the death of Pierre Verge, Emeritus Professor at the
>Faculty of Law, Université Laval, and one of Canada's preeminent labour
>law scholars.*
>
>As a man of excessive modesty and discretion, you might not know of him
>unless you read attentively the best of the Supreme Court decisions on
>labour law matters. Among the threads that runs through these decisions
>are the continual references to Pierre Verge's work. Prodigious, erudite
>and with heart and mind aligned towards worker rights and freedoms, he had
>been crafting the legal reasoning for the constitutional recognition of
>the right to strike as integral to the freedom of association for the last
>three decades. Courts rely on such scholarship and that's why the erosion
>of labour law in many law faculties in English-speaking Canada (in terms
>of both scholarly production and the training of a new generation of
>labour law practitioners) should be a matter of concern to the labour
>movement.
>
>Of course, courts respond to social power and rights can be empty without
>such power. Pierre Verge was among those least inclined to place too much
>faith in court decisions alone, arguing instead for recognition of the
>collective autonomy of workers to organize and act freely. Yet, Court
>decisions can set trajectories at key moments and Pierre Verge was one of
>those scholars who was most influential in crafting the legal reasoning
>that motivated some of the best of those decisions. He also argued for an
>international right to strike and the right to take secondary action for
>cross-border labour conflicts: we're not there yet, but his innovative
>legal reasoning will no doubt live well beyond him.
>
>Gregor Murray
>Université de Montréal
>
>
>
>Le 2015-02-10, 17:00, « Andrew Jackson » <ajacksonclc@xxxxxxxxx> a écrit :
>>Commentary by PSAC lawyers at Ravenlaw
>
>>http://www.broadbentinstitute.ca/en/blog/historic-supreme-court-ruling-st
>>r
>>engthens-workplace-justice
>
>>TURC (Trade Union Research Collective) List
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>
>
>* Subject: Death of Pierre Verge
>
>
>It's with heavy hearts that we wish to inform you of the death of our dear
>colleague Pierre Verge, Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Law,
>Université Laval. A man of excessive modesty, Pierre's contributions were
>simply remarkable: fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the second
>recipient of the Bora Laskin Award for his stellar contributions to labour
>law scholarship in Canada, Dean of his Faculty, a huge investment in all
>aspects of the journal Relations industrielles/Industrial Relations (for
>which his first article dates from 1963 and his last from 2012), Editor of
>the Cahiers de droit, recipient of the Gérard Tremblay Prize of the
>Industrial Relations Department at Université Laval for his outstanding
>contribution to the field of industrial relations, one of the founders and
>guiding spirits of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization
>and Work (CRIMT), an active member of national and international
>associations on labour and social law, an outstanding international
>reputation for his erudition in our field of study, a preeminent
>specialist in the recomposition of labour law, an esteemed and generous
>teacher and colleague who prized above all the humanist values that
>underscored his scholarship, to name but just a few of his
>contributions...
>
>
>
>Pierre died on the evening of Saturday, February 7th, 2015. Parkinson's
>Disease, which he accepted with both courage and lucidity, finally got the
>better of him. Thanks to his wife Colette and their children Marc,
>Caroline and Louis Pierre was able to negotiate this passage embraced in
>love, with dignity and in peace. Even though his illness had greatly
>affected his ability to move and to speak, his intelligence and thirst for
>knowledge remained completely in tact. When the Mélanges / Festschrift
>edited in his honour by Dominic Roux were published by les Presses de
>l'Université Laval last December, he was able to appreciate them and had
>even
>embarked over the last month on an ambitious reading program as the
>different chapters were read aloud. Similarly, he was an active Web
>participant of the Third Pierre Verge Lecture, organized by the Faculty of
>Law and CRIMT on the 22nd of January 2015. On the home page of the CRIMT
>website (<www.crimt.org <http://www.crimt.org>>), you can consult both the
>contents of the book and view the Pierre Verge Lecture delivered, in
>French, by Guylaine Vallée who explores and illuminates the major themes
>defining Pierre Verge's body of work. Pierre was even able to consult the
>most recent Supreme Court of Canada decision (30 January 2015), which
>marked a major reversal of previous decisions in according constitutional
>status to the right to strike which is exactly what Pierre had been
>arguing since the mid-1980s.
>
>
>
>
>
>Guylaine Vallée, Dominic Roux, Gregor Murray, Jacques Bélanger
>
>Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work / Centre de
>recherche interuniversitaire sur la mondialisation et le travail (CRIMT)
>School of Industrial Relations, Université de Montréal; and Faculty of Law
>and Department of Industrial Relations, Université Laval
>
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