The National Police Federation, which represents 20,000 Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers, has launched a class action claiming the federal government has wrongfully prevented part-time officers from buying back into their pension plan.

In a press release, Brian Sauvé, president and chief executive officer at the NPF, said virtually the entire class of part-time officers consisted of women who reduced their hours for different reasons, including caring for young children, providing additional support to children with a disability or because they were single parents. “In many cases, they were working in rural and remote communities away from their families, where childcare options were limited.”

Read: Supreme Court ruling in RCMP pension case may force plan design changes

The union also claims the Supreme Court of Canada decided the issue in 2020 with its decision in Fraser v. Canada. That case engaged an RCMP policy that allowed members who were suspended or had gone on unpaid leave to buy back their pensionable service but didn’t allow members enrolled in a job-share program — under which two full-time members could temporarily work part-time in a single position — to do so.

After the Supreme Court’s decision, however, the federal government, which administers the RCMP’s pension plan, refused to allow members who worked part-time without job sharing to buy back their pensionable service.

In its statement of claim in the Federal Court, the union took the position that there’s no significant difference between job-sharing and part-time work. “The difference between a formal job-share agreement and a part-time work arrangement is one of form not substance: the option to temporarily reduce work hours is exercised overwhelmingly women and individuals engaged in caregiving.”

The union maintains the government’s interpretation of Fraser is “irreconcilable” with the decision and “perpetuates the gender discrimination that the Supreme Court ordered the RCMP to correct and which the RCMP wishes to correct but lack a mechanism to do so.”

Read: How employers can help shrink Canada’s gender pension gap

The Fraser decision, however, wasn’t unanimous, with just six of nine judges forming the majority. Many legal observers believe the majority stretched the limits of the guarantee of equality in Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in what amounted to unwarranted judicial activism.

For their part, the dissenting judges delivered forceful opinions, arguing the majority’s reasoning was “unprincipled” and that its definition of “substantive equality” was “infinitely malleable, allowing judges to invoke it as rhetorical cover for their own policy preferences in deciding a given case.”

Still, Mitch Frazer, a pension lawyer and managing partner at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, believes the union has a strong case.

“This is essentially Fraser 2.0 as it involves a program that primarily disadvantages women, so I don’t see it going any other way so far as the courts are concerned. Fraser is the law and nothing has happened in the last four years to give the Supreme Court any reason to overturn their earlier decision.”

Read: OPTrust allowing plan members temporarily working part time to earn full pension service