The PSEC Mandate and You
by Neve Sugars-Keen
Before I moved to Victoria, I was a T.A. and a CUPE member at Carleton University in Ottawa. I got involved (as so often is the case) during a round of bargaining there two years ago that ended in a two-week strike. 6am picket line shifts in classic Ottawa early spring not-quite-freezing-rain gave me a pretty quick session of Union 101: A Crash Course in Bargaining.
That strike wrapped up with neither party entirely satisfied, as is often the case, and around six months later I moved to Victoria to start my PhD here and became involved in the union. I quickly found out that bargaining here looks very different than bargaining in Ontario (or most other provinces, for that matter) and the reason is PSEC.
In my experience, members who have lived in BC their whole working lives underestimate the impact that PSEC has on the bargaining process. It is true that it can, depending on the mandate, guarantee a certain pool of money that can be put to good use, in contrast to my Ottawa experience where every penny had to be fought for from the university’s budget. But there have also been years like 2010 where the PSEC mandate was “Net Zero,” and every improvement had to draw money from somewhere else in the collective agreement. The mandate is by no means a guarantee of security—not under an NDP government and certainly not under any other.
What is the PSEC mandate?
CUPE 4163 is in the middle of bargaining. Component 3 has just ratified their new collective agreement, and Components 1 and 2 started bargaining in August. In BC, bargaining for public sector unions (like health care, community social services, and education) is complicated: we don’t just sit down at the table with the University until we come to a deal; there’s a hidden player in bargaining rooms across the province.
The Public Sector Employers’ Council, or PSEC, plays a major but often overlooked role in public sector collective bargaining in BC. PSEC was created in 1993 by Premier Harcourt’s NDP government and has since become an official body overseeing public sector collective bargaining in the province. It is a group of public sector BC employers, including government ministers and representatives of public universities (like UVic), K-12 schools, health care, and community social services. These employers, chaired by the BC Minister of Finance, work together to set province-wide guidelines for bargaining with public sector unions. PSEC negotiates a provincial framework for wages and terms in BC which becomes the pattern across all sectors, setting overall compensation. This additional compensation is written in terms of a percentage increase based on total wages and benefits paid to eligible employees in the union in the last year.
PSEC’s scope has expanded over the years. Despite a more limited original role in coordinating collective agreement language, PSEC now tells public sector employers what their offers for compensation and other contract improvements should be (the so-called “mandate”), meaning that all public sector wage offers are the same. At the same time, the PSEC mandate system also lets the university (and other employers) appeal to PSEC constraints when confronted with proposals that they think are excessive. The lines between the two are hard to make out, as the employer’s bargaining plan goes through PSEC to be approved before they come to the union. The PSEC mandate ultimately sets the pool of money within which we have to bargain (or at least that we have without committing to significant and highly uncertain job action), and limits what amount of this can go towards across-the-board wage increases.
The union and PSEC: The limits to collective bargaining in B.C.
The mandate is a major problem for public sector workers and unions. It represents obvious and powerful government intrusion into collective bargaining. PSEC claims to be independent from government, but is chaired by the Minister of Finance. This is a severe conflict of interest from the government in dealing with its own public-sector workforce.
PSEC’s role is not enshrined in legislation in B.C., despite the extent of its involvement, and arbitrators have refused to be guided by the PSEC mandate when called on to resolve bargaining stalemates. The Supreme Court has enshrined free and fair collective bargaining as a Charter right under the right to free association. However, a BC court found in 2014 that the 2010 “Net Zero Mandate” did not violate this right since while it impeded the ability to bargain, it was not a “substantial interference.” This is because it applies to all public sector unions, changes to reflect the government’s budget, and supposedly does not prevent the parties from negotiating non-wage matters (although it should be noted that it does limit the scope of all proposals that would have a cost associated with them). The BC Teachers’ Federation did not appeal this decision.
However, in practice, the PSEC mandate limits free collective bargaining, with negotiations with our immediate employer (the university) routed through a third party with its own vested interest in the outcomes. While it is updated from year to year (such as the shift in 2022 to the “shared recovery” mandate from “sustainable services”), there are significant common threads. For example, both mandate descriptions refer to the need to keep wage increases “fair and reasonable”—which is to say, low.
Public sector unions have to fight harder for better offers than they would otherwise, as we are facing not just the university but the provincial government through PSEC as well. This has entrenched discrepancies in wages and working conditions across post-secondary unions in the province based on differences when the mandate started, preventing unions from closing the gap, and has also put public sector workers in BC at a significant disadvantage next to other provinces in which bargaining is truly free. My personal experience with the mandate comes down to the fact that TAs at Carleton, a university not known as an especially high-paying school in a city with a similar cost of living to Victoria, are paid over $10/hr more than at UVic.
No public sector collective agreement has managed to exceed the mandated general wage increases, even with strike action, since the mandate began being used three decades ago. In 2025, BCGEU, after eight weeks of strike action, won the so-called “enhanced mandate”—an additional 0.5% each year of the contract in compensation for non-wage-increases, on top of the base mandate’s 3% a year in general wage increases, which set the precedent for much of the rest of the province’s public sector. When the enhanced mandate was initially denied to post-secondary, CUPE locals across the province, with UVic at the forefront, locked arms with other unions such as the UVic Faculty Association and PEA to win this for our members. While we ultimately achieved the extra 2% in non-wage money over four years, this does not rule out the threat that PSEC represents to foundational union principles. Working together as public sector unions, within and beyond CUPE and the post-secondary sector, is the only chance we have. Solidarity is the motto of the union movement. It is only through solidarity with our fellow workers, from the individual to the international level, that we can hope to hold the line.