By Claire McFarlane | Cabin Radio
Yellowknife North MLA Shauna Morgan has drafted a private member’s bill which, if passed, would allow Northwest Territories nurses to pursue their own collective agreements.
Currently, nurses are part of the same collective agreement as nearly all other unionized N.W.T. government employees, who are represented by the Union of Northern Workers.
The exceptions, said Morgan, are teachers – who are represented by the N.W.T. Teachers’ Association – and employees of the N.W.T. Power Corporation, who have a separate UNW bargaining unit.
Morgan argues allowing nurses to form their own bargaining unit would let them advocate for needs that are distinct from those of other GNWT employees.
“There’s a long list of issues that make working in front-line healthcare very different from working as a nine-to-five office worker, that can’t be captured or rolled into just one big collective agreement,” said Morgan.
Having their own collective agreement could help make nursing roles more attractive, Morgan said, and improve retention rates.
A private member’s bill is a piece of legislation brought forward by a regular MLA rather than cabinet. Morgan has so far only circulated a draft of her bill and has yet to formally begin trying to turn it into law.
Getting a private member’s bill through the House can be difficult, not least because regular MLAs don’t have the backing of departments when drafting their bills and must follow strict rules. For example, a private member’s bill cannot propose to spend any government money that isn’t already being spent.
Just two of roughly 95 bills that became law in the 19th Assembly were private member’s bills.
In the 20th Assembly, Robert Hawkins, successfully used a private member’s bill last year to convince cabinet to increase student loan limits.
‘The provinces are catching up’
Some nurses have called for this change for years.
“The long-term answer here is for front-line healthcare workers to have their own bargaining unit,” one nurse told Cabin Radio in 2024, requesting anonymity at the time to speak about the sensitive details of their employment and union representation.
While the existing collective agreement allows use of a mechanism called a labour market supplement to offer healthcare staff extra incentives, the nurse said that wasn’t sufficient to keep up with sweeping changes in southern provinces that make working there more attractive.
“There’s less and less incentive for somebody to come to the Northwest Territories and make the sacrifices of living here in the North,” they said.
Sheila Laity, a nurse in the N.W.T. for the past 32 years, was also once a UNW vice-president. She is employed in Yellowknife but has worked in communities across the territory.
“We’re relying on bare minimum for staffing, sometimes below minimum levels, and we’re relying on a lot of temporary workers, people that are coming in and out,” said Laity.
She said working with temporary employees means she and her coworkers are constantly training new people. Practically, that means showing new people where things like supplies and equipment are physically located, but also providing context and instruction on working in a culturally diverse workplace.
“Ultimately, as nurses, as professionals, we would like to see every nursing position filled with people that live in and are part of our community, all through the North,” said Laity.
Currently, she said, the N.W.T. might not be the most attractive place for nurses to work because of the climate, its distance from large urban centres, and the fact that they have no collective agreement addressing their unique needs. (According to Morgan, the N.W.T. and Nunavut are the only Canadian jurisdictions without an agreement specific to nurses.)
“The reality is that the provinces are catching up” in terms of financial offers to nurses, Laity said.
“The stakes are getting high because we don’t have enough nurses in Canada, so we don’t have an edge.
“We’ve asked repeatedly to have a voice and really, when it comes to nurses having a voice at the UNW bargaining table, the only real voice we have is at Stanton Hospital, where the majority of the local members are nurses.”
Bargaining relationship
Morgan said the bill she has drafted would amend the Public Service Act to allow nurses to negotiate their own collective agreements.
The way the Public Service Act is structured, Morgan said, means a bargaining agent for the nurses must be specified. That bargaining agent – in other words, a union – must be a group already established in the legislation.
“Given those constraints, what the bill does is specify that the nurses would continue to be under PSAC – the Public Service Alliance of Canada – and their bargaining agent would be some component of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, and that could very well continue to be the UNW,” said Morgan.
Morgan said the UNW’s representation of N.W.T. Power Corporation workers through a separate agreement to other GNWT staff provides a precedent for this.
In a statement to the CBC, the UNW said it had not been consulted on Morgan’s draft bill and could not provide comment. Morgan said formal consultation would occur later in the process, if the bill passes second reading, and she had been informally consulting with various nurses and one senior figure at the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
Great Slave MLA Kate Reid, who was formerly the president of a UNW local, said she had not yet read Morgan’s draft bill but worried about government interfering in matters between employers and employees.
While Reid said she agrees with the “core philosophy” of what Morgan is proposing, she worries about the precedent this could set.
“I do not feel it is right for any politician to interfere in the bargaining relationship between the employees and the employer, and so I’m trying to be very careful about how that part of this discussion moves forward,” said Reid.
“The union is a key stakeholder in this conversation.
“I know that MLA Morgan wants to have them invested in this conversation, and I think that’s a good thing, I just want to be very clear that myself, as a politician in the Northwest Territories, has no right to tell the workers how they should organize themselves or bargain for themselves.”
‘No one-size-fits-all solution’
CANNN, the association that regulates and represents nurses in the North – though does not represent them in collective bargaining – cautiously welcomed Morgan’s proposal.
The association is “interested in and supportive of any discussing initiatives that contribute to the advancement of the nursing profession and improve the working conditions and retention of nurses,” said CANNN executive director Megan Wood in a statement.
Wood said there is “no one-size-fits-all solution that can be universally applied to address” the challenges nurses face and the obstacles toward recruiting and retaining more of them.
“A more comprehensive approach is required,” she wrote, which “considers the diverse roles, settings, and communities in which nurses are employed.”
“CANNN is eager to collaborate and explore these initiatives as they arise and looks forward to working with our partners in healthcare as things progress,” Wood concluded.
Morgan plans to formally introduce the bill when the legislature sits again in May.
“If there’s enough public discussion and enough people going to their MLAs and talking about why this issue is important to them between now and the May sitting,” she said, “the bill will have a much better chance of getting through second reading and being sent to committee.”
From there, a bill must come through committee review and pass third reading in the House before becoming law.
Meanwhile, a motion introduced by Morgan on Thursday this week urged her colleagues at the legislature to carry out a related “deeper dive into examining healthcare recruitment and retention from the perspective of its workers, to hear from them directly.”
That motion passed with all 11 regular MLAs supporting it and cabinet abstaining.
It has the effect of directing a standing committee of regular MLAs to examine government and health authority policies and management practices, as well as “how we legislate bargaining structures and regulation of healthcare professionals,” Morgan said.
