More than one million students across Ontario face a day of cancelled school in the coming week because of teachers' strikes, but the government of Premier Doug Ford is not using legislation to stop the walkouts — at least not yet.

Legislating teachers back to work is "the last step," Ford said this week when he took questions from reporters at Queen's Park. "What we really want to do is get a deal."

How much labour disruption would it take for the government to legislate an end to the strikes? When I asked Education Minister Stephen Lecce, he said that's not his focus right now, and said negotiated agreements are the "best option for all the parties."

What neither Progressive Conservative politician mentioned: imposing back-to-work legislation now would not likely stand up in court.

To defend such legislation, the government must persuade a court that its actions have a "pressing and substantial purpose." That's the legal test established by the Supreme Court of Canada to justify violating the right to free collective bargaining enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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A day of school lost here and there to rotating strikes almost certainly doesn't meet that bar, according to legal experts.

"There's a difference between a pressing and substantial purpose and an inconvenience to the public," said Kevin Banks, director of Queen's University's Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace.





"If the government's reasons [for back-to-work legislation] have to do with inconvenience, then it may well be too early," Banks said in an interview. "If things get to the point where the school year is in jeopardy, I suspect that there's a good chance a court would say, 'Yes, that is a pressing and substantial purpose.'"

This is one of the key reasons why Ontario teachers unions are strategically choosing to hold one-day strikes. They fear a full-blown indefinite walkout would soon prompt the government to reach for the hammer of back-to-work legislation.

The unions figure these short, rotating work stoppages are their best bet to dissuade the government from making such a move, or to win a legal battle if it comes to that.

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