VANCOUVER—A group of B.C. nurses who lost their jobs for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine had their case against their union dismissed by the Labour Relations Board (LRB) on April 20. The nurses had argued that the union had failed to represent them properly.
“Until the Union has made a final decision regarding the Grievances, the Board cannot review the Union’s conduct as a whole,” Sahota wrote.
“While I recognize the Applicants are frustrated about the time it is taking to resolve the Grievances, this is not a situation where the Union has refused to communicate with the Applicants or has indicated or even implied that it will not be proceeding with the Grievances.”
Sahota said once the BC Nurses’ Union (BCNU) concludes the matter, the applicants can resubmit their applications to the LRB for review.
Mori says BCNU has not processed hundreds of grievances filed by fired members in a timely manner and has ignored their requests for information for more than 18 months.
“The union is not functioning at its job, and they are refusing to represent their terminated members,” Mori said in an interview. “They haven’t talked to us since September 2021 and they’ve refused to publicly acknowledge us, not once, in a year and a half.”
The Epoch Times reached out multiple times to the BCNU but the organization didn’t make anyone available for comment or offer a statement.
September 2021 was when B.C. health officials announced that health-care facility workers across the province would be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 effective Oct. 26 that year. The nurses filed their grievances shortly after they were prevented from working that year.
While the BCNU eventually initiated the grievance procedure, Mori claims the case is not progressing, which she says violates requirements of the CBA.
Further, Mori points to a 2019 case where the union successfully argued via an industry-wide application dispute (IWAD) filed four years earlier that nurses would not face discipline for refusing an influenza vaccine, or for not wearing a mask in the workplace. She says the union hasn’t been pursuing the case of COVID-19 vaccines the same way.
Staffing Deficits
Mori said that during that meeting, while they were denied the opportunity to speak with other nurses in attendance, they discussed several topics with BCNU leaders. These included high staffing shortages, executive staff turnover within the union after the public health order announcement in September 2021, and timelines of filing grievances.Mori says she is baffled by the union’s call for the government to immediately address staffing shortages, yet its refusal to advocate for rehiring fired nurses.
“B.C. nurses are working outside the province because we cannot work in our province,” she said. “And we still have to deal with critical staffing shortages in this province due to the inability of our provincial government to admit that they were wrong.”
Grievance Process
In a Feb. 15, 2023, letter one of the fired nurses provided to The Epoch Times, BCNU Labour Relations Officer Kris Vanlambalgen said the union had filed an IWAD with the Health Employers Association of B.C. (HEABC) as a measure to resolve the outstanding grievances from fired nurses.“Due to the actions of HEABC [Health Employers Association of B.C.] and Health Employers, the Affected Nurses have suffered lost wages, benefits, service, and seniority. Additionally, the Affected Nurses with Protected Grounds have also suffered injury to dignity,” Vanlambalgen wrote.
“The Union is seeking the immediate reinstatement of the nurses impacted by the mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policies and is pursuing a make-whole order for loss of wages, benefits, service, and seniority, in addition to special damages.”
Among the reasons to dismiss the case against the union, Sahota, the LRB vice-chair, wrote that the Union had been updating the nurses and advising the status of the grievances.
Mori claims the union was not interested in her team’s research and data, nor would it share its evidence, if any, that it submitted in the IWAD. That lapse, she said, jeopardized their opportunity to be frontrunners in the battle, if not to meet the protocol in their collective agreement.
“We were the first ones that should have been challenging this stuff because we have access to scientific evidence and front-line worker stories, but they didn’t let us be the first into these challenges,” Mori said.
Criticism
Charlene Le Beau, a lawyer with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, filed a petition in March 2022 seeking to end the B.C. government’s mandate requiring health-care workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment. She said judges across Canada default to government data to justify the measures taken during the past three years.“They’ve manipulated the law in their favour, there’s no doubt about it,” Le Beau told The Epoch Times.
“These are totalitarian times, and the courts are bending themselves into pretzels in order to defer to government science. Almost every COVID challenge is being lost in Canada, and the judges, they’re all parroting the same stuff. ‘We’re in a pandemic. The government had to respond in a way to protect public health. They did what they did, and we are deferring to that.’”
“I raised the question during question period and I pushed this through a number of channels in the legislature, and the response from the health minister [Adrian Dix] was an unequivocal ‘No,’” Rustad told The Epoch Times.
“They’re saying because there’s people in intensive care and we don’t want to put anybody at risk, which is just nonsense because you’re talking about family doctors. You’re talking about nurses throughout the system. And you’re talking about the fact that every other jurisdiction in Canada has dropped their vaccine mandates and hired back their health-care professionals.”
The Epoch Times reached out multiple times to B.C. Ministry of Health for comment but received no reply.
