By IAN ROSS
A prominent Sudbury lawyer was selected to moderate and speak at an international labour and employee law conference in Europe last month.
In May, Brian Gatien, president of Gatien Human Resources Law, headed up an international panel and also delivered a paper on employee privacy rights and whistle-blowing protection at the American Bar Association’s (ABA) International Labour Law Committee meeting in Vienna, Austria.
Gatien is regarded as an esteemed Canadian labour relations specialist and has considerable experience as a chief negotiator for a number of corporate clients.
“This is the first year that they’ve invited me to actually participate on the panel,” says Gatien, a long-time ABA committee member, who has been attending the annual mid-year conference for the past 10 years. The experience has taken him to such international capitals as Hong Kong, London, Paris, Rome and Barcelona.
The four-day event, which took place May 14-18 at the Grand Hotel Wien, usually attracts between 60- and 80 international lawyers, predominately from the U.S., but organizers were expecting a large contingent from Europe this year.
He delivered a Canadian perspective on restrictions on employees’ individual freedom as well as other privacy issues.
Gatien says attending the conference offered him a glimpse into how other jurisdictions structure their labour and employment legislation.
“The way we approach things in Canada is kind of a hybrid between British common law with some American overlap. But also in Quebec, they have the continental Europe civil code approach to labour and employment relationships.
“Canadian lawyers with that exposure and experience are uniquely situated to deal with European lawyers working in a common law jurisdiction. We understand their civil code approaches and we know how to translate that into common law jurisprudence.”
The connections he has made abroad have resulted in foreign lawyers asking his advice and counsel on matters of Canadian and Ontario law. Most recently, he helped the British subsidiary of a Canadian corporation with an employment contract in the hiring of an executive.
While attending the Hong Kong conference 10 years ago, Gatien had the opportunity to meet Chris Patten, the last British Governor of Hong Kong prior to the 1997 handover to China, to discuss the basic law of that country.
Gatien says Hong Kong was referred to as a “special administrative region” with government officials wanting to maintain some of the city’s capitalist ways. But Beijing was also facing some internal conflict in establishing Shanghai as a new portal to China and developing a model based on the Hong Kong free enterprise system. Gatien spent three days in each of those two cities in discussions with Chinese employment lawyers.
Though he doesn’t intend to open a Far East office anytime soon, Gatien says attending these conferences offers him a glimpse into the export of services or products to China and Asia.
Gatien has been practicing the management side of labour law since being called to the bar in 1980. He spent his first five years conducting provincial negotiations with the Ontario Hospital Association as its first director of paramedical and nursing negotiations, before moving to Sudbury in 1985.
His 10-employee firm represents between 120 and 150 clients, mostly in the Canadian public, natural resources and private sector manufacturing engaged in international trade.
The company also offers legal advice in the recruitment of foreign workers to Canada, helps develop employment contracts for Canadians working abroad, and advises Canadian companies on employment regulations in other countries.
