The Ontario Nurses’ Association is launching a constitutional challenge of a law that prevents them from taking any form of job action during the bargaining process, a move hospitals are calling deeply troubling.

Nurses say the Hospital Labour Disputes Arbitration Act is among the most restrictive of its kind in Canada, preventing not just full strikes, but also other forms of job action.

“For decades, [the law] has stripped Ontario nurses and health-care professionals of fundamental constitutional rights and has created a system where employers routinely sidestep meaningful collective bargaining,” association president Erin Ariss said at a news conference.

“Instead, employers have relied on arbitrators to impose contracts that reinforce the status quo and consistently fail to address critical systemic issues like equal wages and understaffing.”

Essential care can be maintained while nurses engage in job action, the association said.

Danielle Bisnar, the lawyer for the ONA, said there are many other models that allow some form of strike action in most other jurisdictions in Canada and across the world.

“Ontario is an anomaly,” Bisnar said.

“This notion that strikes are dangerous or unsustainable or impossible without compromising patient care is just not true, because there are many other models that work and allow job action for health-care workers.”

Nurses in British Columbia were conducting a strike vote Monday.

The Ontario Hospital Association urged ONA to abandon what it called a “reckless challenge to legislation that protects patients from unnecessary risk.”

“Patients do not choose when they need care, and hospitals must always be there for them,” Kirk LeMessurier, chief of communications and public affairs at the OHA, wrote in a statement.

“Any action that opens the door to labour disruption, of any magnitude, in hospitals puts patients at risk.”

Health Minister Sylvia Jones would not comment on the legal challenge, but said the government values nurses.

Ariss said a contract for hospital nurses that came last year through arbitration was the “tipping point.”

The arbitrator awarded hospital nurses pay increases of 5.25 per cent over two years, but the union was disappointed it did not address minimum staffing levels, which they say was their top issue.