EDMONTON -- The Alberta government said 'the time has come to end the suffering' and proceeded Wednesday with legislation to end the province's 23-day-long nursing strike.
Despite objections from the six-member opposition over the severity of the bill, the government stood firm on its intention to end the strike and to severely punish union members, hospitals and the union for failing to comply with the bill's directive.
Even the right-leaning Western Canada Concept MLA Gordon Kesler spoke against a penalty measure in the bill that would decertify any United Nurses of Alberta local whose members refused to return to work.
New Democratic Patry leader said the legislation was more appropriate to Poland's martial law regime.
The govenment, prepared for the criticism by deleting a section of the legislation which would have issued contempt citations to bargaining agents who 'acquiesced' to any refusal to comply with the legislation.
UNA members defied a cabinet order to return to work during a 1980 strike.
Hospital and Medical Care Minister David Russell, who read into the record passages of letters from doctors who could not get patients into hospitals for proper treatment and from families suffering for the same reason, said: 'The time has come to end the anxiety, the time has come to end the suffering ... the dispute has gone on long enough.'
Labor Minister Leslie Young defended the back to work legislation saying 'The right to health care outweighs the privilege of collective bargaining.'
Young said the dispute, which has crippled hospital services across the province since some 7,000 nurses walked off the job Feb. 16 to back demands for better working conditions, resulted from the 'attitude' of negotiators from both UNA and the Alberta Hospitals Association.
'I do not know if it was collective bargaining or the collective bargainers that did not succeed,' Young said.
But opposition spokesman laid the blame directly on the government. Both Notley and Social Credit house leader Raymond Speaker quoted extensively from an AHA report written in 1980 that correctly predicted nursing shortages in the province.
In the study the majority of nurses who had left nursing in the province blamed working conditions for their refusal to return to hospital work.
'It was the inaction on these working conditions that led to this dispute and the (fault) lies with the govenment of Alberta,' Notley said.
By Wednesday evening the bill had passed second reading with all three opposition MLAs in the house -- Kelser, Notley and Socred Walter Buck -- voting against the bill. All 64 Conservatives voted in favor of the bill. The Legislature went into committee and was to go onto third reading without MLAs taking the usual dinner break. The legislation was to come into effect at 7 a.m. the morning after it received Royal assent.
