Collective bargaining by nurses in Canadian health care: assessing recent trends and emerging claims.

Since the late 1990s, health human resource (HHR) policy in Canadian health care has been a mixture of consensus and conflict. Consensus appears to have emerged about the broad policy goals for Canadian HHR planning: immediate recruitment and retention goals, and long-term goals of greater cost-effectiveness and productivity from the health care workforce. This consensus has heightened in the wake of the 2003 SARS crisis and other episodes that reminded the broader public — and not just patients — of the courage and dedication of health care workers. This sunny consensus, however, contrasts starkly with the other trend: increasingly rancorous conflict between governments and health professionals on how to achieve these goals. And nowhere has it been as rancorous as in nurse collective bargaining.