Unifor VCTA v Harbour Link Container Services Inc., 2020 CanLII 13198 (CA LA)
The union complains that the trucking owner is assigning too many truck loads to his own non-union trucks and not enough to union trucks. The arbitrator uses a weekly averaging to penalize the owner when the owner is allocating too many loads to his own trucks. The problem is, says the owner (para 59) that virus will reduce loads from China. There will be fewer loads overall. Do penalize the owner for an overall slow-down in loads.
That’s the first appears of the virus in Canadian law.
What did the first appearance of the first virus (Black Plague) look like in English law in 1347?
Ian Mortimer says that the Black Plague arrived in England, by ship, through the port of Dorcet on August 17 1348 (p.261). King Edward III lost his infant son William, on September 5, 1348. Edward could not close the ports. He had an army in Normandy and what may have been equally as important, his daughter Joan was travelling by ship to Bordeaux where she was to marry the son of the king of Castille. Joan died in Bordeaux on July 1 1348. (p.260)
Edward meanwhile thought it best to sail to Normandy and see this plague first hand.
London was now burying two hundred people a day. Mortimer says that Londoners were ‘isolating themselves in terrified huddles’ (p.261). This led Edward to move to the Tower of London. (p.262). The king nevertheless continued with public gatherings and in a typically chivalrous counter-punch to the enemy plague, Edward instituted the Order of the Garter (p.263).
All lawyers remember this as one of those esoteric English institutions like the queen’s counsel (QC) that we used to fight over. Mortimer says this is all a king could do at the time – show some sort of defiance in the only way a fourteenth century king could. Edward continued with tournaments even though it was well-known that the plague spread ‘though the mouth and the eye’ (p.261)
What were the economics of the plague in England?
The 1348 writer Henry Knighton records that the autumn of 1349, that a reaper could not be gotten for less than eight pence with food [2019 equivalent £20 which would buy 3 gallons of dried wheat] a mower cost twelve pence with food. Many crops perished in the fields for lack of harvesters (p.268). Wages, in effect, doubled (p.269) as a result of the drastic contraction of the supply of labour.
Then Edward did the stupidest but typically English thing: The Ordinance of Labourers: Edward ordered that no lord were to offer higher wages than before the plague and no labour was to seek a higher wage. (p.269)
The decrease in the supply of labour raised wages meant that labour-intensive transactions (crops) now became relatively more expensive than less labour-intensive use of land (cattle-grazing). Demand pressure drawing labour away from crops, toward more remunerative work, led landowners out of crops (which thus became more expensive because of crop decrease). Landowners rather rented out their lands for grazing. Some evidence of this is the fall in rental price of grazing land and the increase in quality of grazing land after the Black Plague.
Historians date this as the beginning of the end of feudalism, (being the land-specific legal tie of a worker to a particular piece of property).
