Full bibliography

In 1951, it was obvious to Justice Cornelius O’Halloran, one of the most outspoken members of the British Columbia Court of Appeal (bcca), that picketing was unlawful. According to him, “in a unionized city like Vancouver everybody knows what a picket line means. Many neutral individuals are afraid of patronizing places where labour picketers none too subtly convey by their organized and militant presence and patrol the unspoken threat ‘you better not patronize this place.’” O’Halloran’s statement was made in a judgment that held that two trade unionists who paraded peacefully in front of a restaurant with signs that stated that the restaurant did not have collective agreements with the union were acting illegally. His equation of picketing with coercion was not idiosyncratic. In its first one hundred years, despite several changes in the legal regime governing labour relations in the province and numerous changes in court membership, unions won only eight out of the thirty-eight decisions on the legality of picketing and obtained partial victories in another two. However, the one-sided results obscure the extent of the debate within the bcca, especially in its early years, over whether there was any room at all for lawful picketing as well as over the greater success achieved by unions in cases heard in the post-Charter era. --Introduction