June 4 2017
DoctorsOntario joined together with Dr. Kulvinder Gill, president and co-founder of Concerned Ontario Doctors (COD) to fund and support the Tentative Binding Interest Arbitration (tBIA) legal analysis by prominent labour lawyer, Mr. Richard Charney. Click here to visit the COD's website for their detailed analysis and opinions. We echo the COD's concerns and feel that the current tBIA is not in the best interest for our profession and recommend that we vote no.
We cannot stress enough our concerns in this matter. We urge you to read this before you vote. The Ontario Liberal government has stacked the cards in its favour that are unprecedented in other provinces. There are even clauses that cancel-out important parts of Ontario's Arbitration Act.
For 20 years, we have lobbied the OMA to have dispute mechanisms in our Master Agreements. The OMA has come a long way from having a blank space under a dispute mechanism heading, to one that sends it back to the Physicians Services Committee (PSC), the same OMA-government group who created the "deals", to a flawed mechanism that led us to the current impasse over 3 years ago, and finally to the current interest arbitration dispute mechanism. Like you, we find the legal terminology complex and want to fully understand what the proposed dispute mechanism's clauses really mean, what laws govern arbitration in Ontario, and what other physician groups in Canada have negotiated. This is why we teamed up with the COD.
Below are excerpts from Mr. Richard Charney's legal analysis on the tBIA with our comments. To further simplify our concerns, we are using the following colour-coding:
Yellow: significant concerns
Red: critical concerns
We encourage you to talk with your colleagues and ask questions to help you make this important decision. Lastly in the next 2-3 days, we will release a strategy for the coming months and beyond the tBIA vote. The decision we make in the coming weeks will have a long term effect on the future of our practices, the future of our profession, and the future of medical in Ontario.
Let's make the right decision, together.
Yours truly,
Dr. Douglas Mark MD
and the Board of DoctorsOntario