In 1996, the New Democrats under the leadership of Glen Clark won British Columbia’s provincial election. Due to economic strains experienced during the 1990s, Canada’s federal government reduced the level of funding it distributed to the provinces. The opposition Liberal Party, a conservative press, and the business community placed pressure on Clark’s New Democrats to balance its budget, a challenge given that British Columbia’s public sector employed approximately 240,000 workers across a wide range of sectors.

In attempting to balance its budget and ward off attacks mounted on its ability to manage British Columbia, the Clark government limited pay rises for public servants to 0 per cent in 1996 and 1 per cent in 1997. It then announced that in the remaining years of its term, it would ‘permit’ (if this is in fact an accurate descriptor) 0 per cent increases over the next two years and 2 per cent in the third year: what became known as the 0-0-2 mandate. There were two qualifications to this. A 1 per cent increase each year would be available to rectify problems associated with pay equity (female labour being undervalued vis-à-vis males) and for workers on low pay grades.

Even though the Clark government had ‘good’ relations with unions, it realised they would find it difficult to accept its 0-0-2 mandate. In trying to overcome this problem, Clark offered them something in exchange for accepting wage restraint. It asked unions to offer suggestions to improve the operation of the work that they were doing and services they were providing within a framework which was described as Accords. There were three stipulations attached to the Accords. First, these negotiations had to be separate from the ‘normal’ collective bargaining associated with wages and working conditions (though taking wages off the table, other than for the caveats, would presumably have reduced the number of issues up for negotiation); secondly, the Accords had to be cost neutral; and, thirdly, in the public interest.

Canadian industrial relations are based on the United States’ National Labour Relations Act of 1935, or Wagner Act. What is significant here is that it precludes ‘managerial prerogatives’ from its jurisdiction. In Australia, this translates into the Australian Fair Work Commission being confined to dealing with ‘industrial matters’. The Accord processes provided public sector unions and their respective employers/public sector centres with ‘scope’ to negotiate issues that would have normally been included under the rubric of managerial prerogatives. Unions and their members were encouraged to pursue issues which could enhance efficiency, aid the delivery of services, and promote the well-being and morale of workers.

Clark appointed Tony Penikett, a former union official and long-term politician, and John Calvert, a long-term British Columbia bureaucrat, plus one administrative assistant, to co-ordinate and help the parties negotiate the Accords. A total of 35 Accords were negotiated across a diversified public sector and a wide range of issues.

In the latter part of the 1990s, Glen Clark and his government were involved in a series of controversies and scandals. He resigned in 1999 over allegations that he had accepted a bribe; he was subsequently exonerated following an inquiry (Tyabji Reference Tyabji2002). These attacks resulted in the New Democrats being routed in the 2001 election; they only won 2 of British Columbia’s 79 seats, with the Liberal Party’s Gordon Campbell winning the other 77!

Campbell’s Liberals pursued a neoliberal agenda and undid many of the Accords that had been negotiated and mounted an attack on unions designed to remove them from the public sector. Cases were initiated by both teachers and health workers. The Canadian Supreme Court found the Campbell government’s attempts to abolish these public sector unions as being inconsistent with The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Savage and Smith Reference Savage and Smith2017). The major Accords which the Campbell government left alone were those that involved unions in the joint governance of pension (what Australians would call superannuation) schemes. The apparent reason for this is that joint governance reduced the exposure and costs of insurance of the British Columbia government in administering such schemes.

The authors of 35 Accords were the two officers who had been appointed to lead the negotiation of these Accords. They provide an insider’s account of problems and issues associated with the development of each of the Accords. This analysis is couched in an examination of Accord-type arrangements previously negotiated in the UK, Australia, and Ontario. They also offer a historical overview of the operation of the public sector in British Columbia as well as a discussion of the fundamentally different approaches of the Clark and Campbell governments to public sector labour relations and dealings with unions. In these respects, 35 Accords: Re-imagining British Columbia’s Public Sector Labour Relations provides a more than useful account of this unique period in British Columbia’s history and issues associated with the conduct of public sector industrial relations.