Thank you.
Sir, I'm the president of the Canadian Labour Congress. And with me is our secretary-treasurer, Hassan Yussuff. We are elected to represent 3.2 million Canadian workers, and we speak for them.
I want to start off by telling you that, for the record, 911 is a provincial jurisdiction, not a federal jurisdiction. For the record, there have been two disputes in British Columbia involving the dispatchers of that essential service, and not one essential service disruption happened in British Columbia under that legislation.
I might also point out that less than one-quarter of one percent of the banking industry is unionized in this country, and to think that a dispute in that industry would have any effect on any customers is a real stretch of the truth.
I also want to point out that the number one country in the world for doing business last year was Ireland. It has anti-scab legislation.
I was the president of the British Columbia Federation of Labour when the last anti-scab legislation was brought into place in 1993. Let me tell you, Chair, that all of these arguments that you've been hearing and all this hyperbole that you're hearing, I heard in British Columbia. None of it happened. I don't think you should compare statistics across jurisdictions. Look at the graphs in B.C. and Quebec. The number and frequency of disputes stayed the same before and after anti-scab legislation. That's not the issue.
I do agree with only one thing that we heard from the labour minister. The issue is balance. But they want you to presume that balance exists now. Balance doesn't exist right now.
Dealing with multinational transnational corporations at the federal level, single Canadian citizens who are employees of those corporations do not have a balanced relationship with those companies.
The things that changed in British Columbia, which we had to look at afterwards, were the changes in the tone and the tenor of the dispute, especially afterwards when everybody--both the employees and the employer--had to go back and work for a common cause to make that company successful.
Our staff representatives and our affiliates and management in those companies said that the tone and tenor of those disputes helped labour relations after the dispute happened because people's jobs weren't threatened.
I want to also point out, just for the sake of the members, that the vast majority of injuries and incidents on the picket line were by the picketers themselves, not the strikebreakers. Usually the strikers themselves are the ones injured, sometimes very seriously. The RCMP liaison officers who dealt with us in British Columbia told us very clearly that their jobs were made much easier and more effective after we put anti-scab legislation in and that almost never are the RCMP called to picket-line disputes in British Columbia any more.
Both provinces, Quebec and B.C., I might add, with changes of government, with different political slants, have chosen, rightly, not to ever change or alter that legislation.
So what it does is put into the hands of Canadian citizens some equal balance to deal with the same employer.
The only other point I want to make is that I hope some of the intervenors talk about lockouts and not just strikes, because lots of times we are locked out by those employers; we're not necessarily on strike. So this is to put an element of fairness and balance back into the system.
Don't base your deliberations on dire specious predictions, quite frankly. Look at the facts and the two jurisdictions that have them. Within that jurisdiction, think about it on a federal level. It is in our interests to maintain essential services. The union movement has never been reluctant to provide the essential services when the case can be made. We think there should be a third-party arbiter for disputes regarding essential services, as exists in B.C. right now, where it works extremely well.