[JURIST] Justice Ian MacDonnell of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice [official website] ruled [judgment, PDF] Tuesday that officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) [official website], Canada's federal police force and the country's largest law enforcement entity, can form unions. MacDonnell's ruling struck down a portion of the RCMP Regulations [1988, SOR/88-361 text] that established a labor representation scheme that infringed on officers' right to freedom of association. The ruling also struck down a section of the regulations that the court held violated the RCMP members' right to freedom of speech. In upholding the right to form a union, MacDonnell wrote:

If the submission of the respondent is that a collective bargaining process in which employees are not permitted to be represented by an association of their own choosing is constitutionally acceptable, I reject it. The Supreme Court of Canada was clear in BC Health Services that what is protected under ss. 2(d) [of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms] is "the capacity of members of labour unions to engage, in association, in collective bargaining on fundamental workplace issues." The majority stated that "[this] means that employees have the right to unite, to present demands to... employers collectively and to engage in discussions in an attempt to achieve workplace-related goals." The majority also referred to Justice Bastarache's observation, in Dunmore, that "the law must recognize that certain union activities [such as] making collective representations to an employer... may be central to freedom of association even though they are inconceivable on the individual level". [sic] In my view, those passages make it clear that the right to form a labour association and the right to a process of collective bargaining are not disconnected rights, and that the latter right is an emanation of the former.