Bill 124 / Bill 28 — Healthcare & Education Wage Suppression

Bill 124 was challenged in court by the Ontario Nurses' Association and dozens of other unions. In November 2022, an Ontario Superior Court judge struck down the law as unconstitutional, finding it infringed on workers' Charter-protected right to freedom of association and collective bargaining. Ford's government appealed. In February 2024, the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the ruling in a 2-1 decision, writing that "organized public sector workers, many of whom are women, racialized and/or low-income earners, have lost the ability to negotiate for better compensation or even better work conditions that do not have a monetary value."

The Court of Appeal's framing was pointed: the government's wage suppression had fallen most heavily on the most vulnerable public sector workers. The Ford government eventually agreed to repeal Bill 124, but the three years of wage suppression had already caused significant harm — nurses had left the profession, healthcare wait times had lengthened, and the system had become increasingly reliant on expensive private staffing agencies. Ontario taxpayers paid $4.3 million in legal costs after the government lost its case.

Bill 28 represented a separate and more alarming precedent. The notwithstanding clause of the Charter allows governments to override fundamental rights — it is supposed to be used sparingly and for extraordinary circumstances. Ford invoked it to prevent low-wage education workers from exercising their right to strike over wages that hadn't kept up with inflation. Bill 28 imposed fines of $4,000 per day on each individual worker who struck, and $500,000 per day on CUPE as an organization — penalties designed to make any labour action economically catastrophic.

The response was immediate and unprecedented. Canada's largest unions threatened a province-wide general strike in solidarity with CUPE workers. The threat of a general strike united Canadian labour in a way that hadn't been seen in decades. Within days, Ford blinked: he held a press conference, said he would repeal Bill 28 "as a sign of good faith," and the government introduced the repeal legislation (Bill 35) within a week. It passed unanimously.

The Bill 124 saga contributed directly to Ontario's nursing shortage crisis. As hospital nurses' wages were capped at 1% while private agency nurses earned premium rates without the cap, the economic incentive to leave hospital employment became substantial. Emergency rooms began closing overnight. Surgeries were cancelled. The healthcare system accumulated a backlog that persisted long after the law was struck down. The Ford government's response to the ER closures — threatening to fine hospitals that closed emergency departments — was widely criticized as blaming institutions for a staffing crisis the government had created.

The use of the notwithstanding clause in Bill 28, even briefly, established a chilling precedent. The clause had been used sparingly in Ontario's history; Ford reached for it against the lowest-paid education workers in the system during a cost-of-living crisis. Constitutional scholars warned that the willingness to invoke the notwithstanding clause against fundamental labour rights could be repeated. Ford had previously threatened to use the notwithstanding clause in other contexts, suggesting the government viewed it as a routine political tool rather than an extraordinary measure of last resort.

Together, Bills 124 and 28 represented a coherent political strategy: suppress wages for unionized public sector workers, transfer the savings to fiscal figures the government could point to, and use state power — including constitutional override — to prevent workers from fighting back. The strategy was ultimately repudiated by the courts and by the labour movement, but not before billions in suppressed wages had already been withheld, and not before Ontario's healthcare system had sustained structural damage that would take years to repair.