Labour Policy in Canada: New Platform, New Paradigm

The project of re-thinking Canadian labour policy within a human capital policy is best understood as the domestic equivalent of the international effort to reconceive the nature of development as requiring the integration of the economic and the social. Changes in modes of productive relations in the "new economy" require not just a complex reassessment of the best ways to achieve the goals of various labour policies but, more radically, involve a challenge to the conceptual basis of labour law. This both requires and provides the opportunity for a reconceptualization of the appropriate "platform" for delivering labour law and a new paradigm for understanding labour law itself.