Bill 31, the package of labour-law amendments just passed by the Ontario legislature, goes by many names. For the record, the Harris government calls it the Economic Development and Workplace Democracy Act. At The Toronto Star, it is wearily tagged as "another anti-union bill," while NDP leader Howard Hampton condemns it as "anti-worker." For Ontario Federation of Labour president Wayne Samuelson, the stakes are even higher. The bill, he says, is nothing less than "a fundamental attack on democracy." In common usage, however, it is simply "the Wal-Mart bill" - a reference to the celebrated case last year, in which the Ontario Labour Relations Board ordered employees at a Windsor Wal-Mart to join the United Steelworkers of America, though the workers themselves had voted against unionization by a margin of almost 4 to 1. The "fundamental attack on democracy" of which the government stands accused is to take that power away from the OLRB. That is, the bill would require that a majority of employees in a workplace vote in favour of a union before it can be certified. Majority vote?

How undemocratic can you get? Another round of "Joe Hill," everyone.

Perhaps the best name for the bill, then, would be An Act to Prevent Clairvoyance at the OLRB. In future, if the OLRB does not like the result of a certification ballot, it will have to content itself with ordering another vote: no more automatic certification, based on the board's divinations of what the workers would really have preferred. In the Wal-Mart case, indeed, the board's extrasensory powers extended even further than that. The clear desires of the overwhelming majority of the store's employees, as expressed in a secret ballot - another of the Harris government's "anti-union" initiatives" - were overturned on the grounds that the company had engaged in "unfair labour practices." As most provinces' labour laws have evolved, these are defined as just about anything the company might say or do to dissuade its employees from starting a union. If, for example, the company were to tell its employees that it might just close up shop rather than wait for the union to drive it out of business, that would be an unfair labour practice - even if that were in fact what it intended. Of course, if the company were to deny that it had any such plans, and then shut the doors, that would very likely run it afoul of the law, as well. So the prudent thing, you would think, would be to say nothing at all.

You would think that, except that's exactly what Wal-Mart did. When workers asked, at a company Q&A,what would happen to the store if it were unionized - the first, and still the only union shop in the entire, 2,600-store Wal-Mart chain - management, on the advice of its lawyers, refused to reply.

According to the OLRB, in so doing the company was not simply trying to stay out of trouble, but was actually engaged in a subtle form of intimidation: so subtle that it eluded the 43 employees who voted for the union, but just intimidating enough to persuade some fraction of the 151 who voted against.

To come to this amazing conclusion, the board had to read the minds not only of the company - to know what it really intended by its silence - but of each one of its employees. It had to know how many understood this silence as a threat, and how many of these voted against the union on this basis - how many, that is, who were not already intending to vote no.

Kreskin should have such powers.

It is unsettling enough, in a liberal society, that a bare majority of employees should be entitled to speak on behalf of the rest - and, under the Rand formula, to force even the dissenters to hand over part of their wages in union dues. It is curious, too, that while union reps are allowed to present any argument they like as to why workers should join a union, the company is not allowed to argue back. But for the minority to bind the majority, based not on what the company said but what it didn't say, is really too much.

The bill's critics argue that without the threat of automatic certification, workers who might wish to organize have no real protection against management intimidation. It is useless, they say, just to order another vote.

But it seems to work well enough in most other jurisdictions: as with earlier legislation permitting the use of "replacement workers" during strikes, the Harris reforms only return Ontario to the mainstream of North American labour law.

If the company really is up to no good - firing workers for union activities, say - the OLRB still has plenty of other weapons in its arsenal. But for most purposes, the secret ballot should suffice.