Mr. Speaker, as I understand the decorum of the House, each individual is entitled to his own opinions on legislation. It is not necessarily directed by some other magical force.
I listened to the hon. member speak, saying that I somehow said that workers had no rights whatsoever. Nothing could be further from the truth. I talked about the importance of the labour movement. In fact, the first thing I said was about the important gains that have been made over the years.
We are not talking about one's right to strike. Clearly one does have the right to strike. We are talking about a small section of that: replacement workers during a strike. We talked about the exemptions in which an employer could use replacement workers during a strike, which is a very tempered thing. Workers cannot be employed when the prime purpose of that is to undermine the bargaining position of the union. It is very respectful of the union and very respectful of the orientation to try to resolve strikes, but the adversarial attitude that the member has hearkens back to that kind of conflict that was prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s.
I have my own kids who are out in the labour force. I can say that they do not think about the aspects of strikes. They talk about employer-employee communication systems and about human resources programs where they sit down and iron out their conflicts in a sensible fashion.
That is really where we have to go as a nation, because the reductions in productivity that are caused by work stoppages affect all of us, not just the workers and the employers but everybody in the country. They reduce our wealth and our access to consumer goods, et cetera. We have to find better ways and tools and I think what is here is a compromise between two absolutes: an employer having the right to replace all the workers and the strikers having the ability to totally close the plant down and make it not operate. We have to get beyond this.
I think the whole debate that the Bloc is bringing here today is really quite moot. It is that quite old labour negotiation talk. We have to move beyond that and get into something more modernistic and more effective for the people of Canada.