HALIFAX—Nova Scotia Crown attorneys are preparing to form picket lines around the provincial legislature on Wednesday to protest a government bill that would take away their right to arbitration.

The Nova Scotia Crown Attorneys’ Association (NSCAA) announced the intention to strike on Tuesday afternoon at a news conference inside Province House. NSCAA president Perry Borden said he and fellow prosecutors would be back, picketing outside the same building on Wednesday morning.

“We’re here because the government has essentially gutted our collective bargaining rights,” Borden said.

“We can’t negotiate with a government that breaks agreements.”

Until last week, the Crowns were in contract negotiations with the province but reached an impasse over salaries. While they want a 17 per cent salary increase over four years, the province is offering seven per cent.

The stalled negotiations were due to be passed to an independent arbitrator until, on Oct. 16, the provincial Liberal government introduced Bill 203. If passed into law, the bill would take away the Crown lawyers’ right to arbitration and give them the right to strike.

But according to legal experts who made presentations at the legislature last week, the right to strike would be essentially meaningless because the bill would also make the Crowns’ work an essential service.

Borden said about 80 per cent of the province’s 100 Crowns would walk off the job, with some remaining to work “serious” cases, including murders and sexual assaults, that are already before the courts.

“Tomorrow, there’s a critical issue of uncertainty for the participants within the justice system,” Borden said.

“Our partners — victims, judges, police officers and defence counsel — will all be impacted by this walkout.”

Asked what courts across the province would look like on Wednesday, Borden said, “It’s going to be chaotic, mayhem.”

Star Halifax asked a provincial spokesperson how the Department of Justice was planning to manage the courts during the strike and did not receive a response by deadline.

When Crown attorneys staged an illegal strike in 1998, the province contracted private counsel to step in and adjourn cases until the dispute was resolved. But the legal framework in Canada has since changed.

Because of the 2016 Jordan decision from the Supreme Court of Canada, cases not tried in provincial court within 18 months of charges being laid can be dismissed.

Asked if he was prepared to see cases thrown out because of the fallout from his government’s proposed legislation, Premier Stephen McNeil told reporters the province would “continue to seek out to ensure that we have other ways to ensure that justice is delivered.”

The premier has defended Bill 203 by saying the province simply couldn’t afford what the Crowns were proposing — not because of the $5-million price tag alone, but because it would set a new wage pattern for all 75,000 public-sector workers.

Despite hearing a presentation from a legal expert last Friday who said the argument was flawed, McNeil stuck with the defence on Tuesday when reacting to news of the impending strike.

Raymond Larkin, a trade union lawyer who served on three of four arbitration boards for Nova Scotia Crown attorneys in the past 20 years, told the law amendments committee that the premier argued strongly, but mistakenly, for Bill 203.

“Patterns are very important in public-sector bargaining, but a pattern in which unions and employers agree to follow something that’s been determined in relation to another group, that can never be set by 100 Crown attorneys,” Larkin said Friday.

Paul Cavalluzzo, a Toronto labour and constitutional lawyer who represents the NSCAA, told the law amendments committee on Friday that the bill is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.

“And what I recommend to this committee, in its oversight capacity, is that it demand from the Department of Justice the legal opinion that is required in order to assure that a proposed law is charter compliant,” Cavalluzzo said.

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“This is required by the (Charter of Rights and Freedoms), and I suggest to you that no such opinion exists.”

The premier would not say whether it had received such a legal opinion.

“We have a bill that is before the House,” he told reporters Tuesday. “Like all pieces of legislation that we put through, we’re confident that this bill will stand up, and if required to defend it, we will.”

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