Agreeing during a downturn

35 Accords: Re-imagining British Columbia’s Public Sector Labour Relations
by Tony Penikett and John Calvert 

Cambridge, UK: Ethics International Press, 2025
$57  /  9781837112791

Reviewed by Richard Fyfe

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Former Yukon Premier Tony Penikett and academic Dr. John Calvert of Simon Fraser University have written a book based on their central negotiator roles for 35 policy agreements with British Columbia unions during the years from 1997 until the 2001 BC New Democratic Party election loss.  The title 35 Accords refers to the 35 agreements that Penikett and Calvert successfully negotiated.   

The book is primarily a record of the concept, strategies, and outcomes from an innovative government policy-development approach proposed by then-Premier Glen Clark.  At the time Clark’s financially-strapped government was facing “an imminent economic crisis.”  The authors explain that Premier Clark was faced with almost 240,000 public employee contracts expiring on the same day, as well as two prior years of restraint.  Motivated by his aversion to “massive layoffs, pay freezes or cuts, asset sales, privatisation, and other regressive policies,” the Premier therefore “searched for something new and completely different.”  Inviting unions to participate in government policy development through the accord negotiation process provided that difference.   

The book begins by setting out the three main goals of the accord negotiation exercise.  These included: finding a way to have unions accept sub-inflation wage increases; identifying public policy changes that the government would consider to be in the public interest; and maintaining union support for the government. By inviting input from a number of labour unions, Clark hoped to offer non-financial “accords” in exchange for unions accepting a restrictive (0, 0 and 2 percent) wage increase package.  The negotiations were largely successful although many were either abandoned, reversed, or ignored by the Liberal government following their election in 2001.  While the book and its subject will be of most interest to someone with a desire to understand the BC collective bargaining process during the relevant time period, or who may be considering a similar approach to address collective bargaining challenges, it is unquestionably a specialized, event-specific chronicle that is less likely to appeal strongly to a broader audience.   

“Many of the issues discussed in this book still face governments today.” With British Columbia presently in the midst of another round of challenging union negotiations, this quote from the book may explain the authors’ motivation for writing this book some 25 years later. Indeed, the authors suggest that “it is timely – in the current polarized political environment, perhaps even urgent – that the details now come to light.”  As they observe, there was limited public coverage of the accords at the time of their signing due in part to the untimely resignation by Premier Clark and subsequent NDP election loss, the lack of support from the incoming Liberal government and hostile or poor media coverage. 

The book is written in four parts.  In Part 1, the authors describe the challenge, in terms of the economic, political and labour context that they faced.  They explain that they rejected government’s offers of a support team, limiting their team to only three people (Penikett, Calvert and one support person) to maintain confidentiality.  To begin, they examine the failures experienced in other jurisdictions (the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ontario) when they attempted to address similar economic challenges using variants of an accord or policy development process.  Studying these experiences allowed the negotiators to identify several “lessons learned” that were taken into account as they developed a negotiation process for British Columbia. 

Beginning with the experience in the United Kingdom, the authors note that agreements between Labour and unions are not uncommon, dating back to the early post-war Atlee government.  They then focus on the period from 1976 until the 1979 election loss to Margaret Thatcher by Prime Minister Callaghan’s minority government.  The authors describe the gradual erosion of union support for voluntary wage constraints during this period, driven by high inflation, large government deficits, and a gaping disparity between private-sector and public-sector wage settlements.  “If there is a lesson from the UK’s experience, it is that the success of a voluntary social contract is contingent on government continuing to deliver its side of the bargain,” the UK discussion in the book concludes.

Turning next to Australia and the 1987 “Australia Reconstructed” accord process, the authors review both the early successes and the eventual government failures which led to the 1996 defeat of the Australian Labour Party.  They explain that although a number of successful accords were negotiated, the Labour government began to allow increasing participation by better funded “corporate appointees” in order to gain much-needed investment support from business.  This resulted in union appointees becoming “junior partners in a governance process in which the more extensive resources of corporations … tilted the balance strongly in favour of business priorities.”  Union credibility was weakened as it continued to support the government despite receiving fewer and fewer benefits from doing so.  The lesson that the authors took from the Australian experience was that “social contracts are only viable when the benefits to unions and the workers they represent continue to flow.  Once a social contract becomes primarily a vehicle for wage controls, it becomes increasingly problematic for unions to continue to get their members to support it.”   

The failed experience by the Bob Rae government in Ontario provides the book’s final case study.  The authors explain that after coming into power unexpectedly in 1990 and facing a rapidly deteriorating Ontario economy and a ballooning deficit, Premier Rae sought to impose a pre-determined social contract rather than engage in a genuine negotiation with labour.  He moved to dramatically reduce public spending and impose a 5% wage rollback together with major staffing cuts.  The authors explain that rather than receiving union support, Rae actually united the labour movement in opposition to his social contract, leading to the Ontario Federation of Labour breaking its ties with the New Democratic Party and to the dramatic collapse of the New Democratic Party in 1993.  Lessons from the Ontario experience included the challenges from bringing all the unions together at the same time, the risks in having a public, rather than confidential process for negotiations, and the resistance that resulted from adopting a top-down approach instead of engaging in true negotiations.   

In Part 2 of the book, armed with the lessons from the three different failed experiences, the authors describe the process they developed for BC and explain how these experiences influenced the British Columbia government to take a different path.  Prior to any negotiations, Penikett consulted widely with unions and even travelled to Toronto to “interview Rae at length and others involved in the Ontario social contract.” 

Avoiding one of Premier Rae’s errors, Glen Clark “rejected the idea of negotiating a province-wide social contract at a single table with all the unions in the broader public sector” opting instead for a “flexible, sector-by-sector approach.”  The accord negotiations were conducted separately from the collective bargaining but with the proviso that the accords would only be implemented if a successful labour agreement was reached.  The authors suggest that this approach allowed government to keep the two processes separate but linked. 

The authors also use Part 2 of the book to describe various negotiating challenges they faced, such as fragmented bargaining units, lack of union experience with government policy development, and resistance from crown corporation employers.   

Part 3 describes the accord negotiation process itself after the BC Cabinet gave its approval in fall 1997.  Although they had opted for a very small negotiating team, the negotiators engaged in extensive consultations with Deputy Ministers and others in government for support, relevant project background information, research, problem identification, and eventual accord implementation. 

Because accord negotiation was occurring in parallel with collective bargaining, it was necessary to decide which issues belonged in accord negotiations rather than at the bargaining table for collective agreements.  Many of the issues had overlapping aspects, increasing the negotiating challenges.  For many accords, detailed technical or legal work was left to be carried out once the legislation implementing an accord had passed. 

Part 3 continues with an examination of the reasons that the accords received little public attention and a review of the measures taken by the Liberal government to overturn many of the accords.  Part 3 then concludes with a summary of the lessons learned from the BC process. 

Part 4 simply provides a detailed, thematic outline of the objectives, content and process involved for each of the accords.  The authors’ insights regarding the negotiation process are expanded in this section as they discuss each of the 35 accords in more detail. 

At the end of the book, it is apparent that external factors, such as the legal issues that caused Premier Clark’s resignation and inability to continue public support for the accords, and the 2001 election loss were highly instrumental in the reversal of many of the accords.  The authors underscore however that the accords related to changing the way public sector pension funds in British Columbia were left intact – making an important difference in terms of both independent fund management and pension plan administration.  This, they say, was a significant benefit to both public sector workers and to government. 

Anyone considering the pursuit of an accord approach in parallel with collective bargaining will benefit from the candid discussion of the experience of Penikett and Calvert.  Although there is an undertone of something like bitterness or disappointment that comes through when they discuss the factors that contributed to non-implementation of many of the accords, it is certainly understandable when one considers that massive effort involved in successfully negotiating 35 accords. 

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Richard Fyfe is a semi-retired lawyer and former Deputy Attorney General for British Columbia.  As a retirement project, he is currently in the process of completing a Master of Laws (LLM) degree at the University of Victoria, with a focus on prison law.  [Editor’s Note: Richard Fyfe has recently reviewed books by Michael C. K. Ma & Mike Larsen and Dany Lacombe with Mac McKinney for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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