Human Resources committee  Honourable members, please look at appendix A of our submission. The current web page of the largest Canadian local of the Labourers' International Union says this about union cards: Don't sign anything! You do not have to sign anything. Don't be tricked into signing something “to get more information”....

Transport committee  I agree. I looked, and Hamilton was two out of four, and it was two out of two in Kitchener-Waterloo. That's the magic union number to ensure that extra hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money is used on certain projects rather than spreading them further. It needs to change.

Transport committee  That's correct. There is what you'd call wall-to-wall unions in construction in this country. For example, in Saskatchewan, the CEP, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, can now operate in competition with the building trades. The Christian Labour Association of Canada can do the same.

Transport committee  I have nothing else to add.

Transport committee  That's my view.

Transport committee  Certainly, municipal ones are what I'm most familiar with, from reading some of the different schemes and seeing them take place. But a lot of them exist under provincial legislative schemes, and they're provincially funded as well. The question is, how much actual, pure, 100% provincial infrastructure is there?

Transport committee  That's my understanding, yes.

Transport committee  Alberta is the first jurisdiction in this country to attempt to deal with these inappropriate schemes that unions have put together. I've just reviewed an electrical collective agreement from Ontario, where, in some cases, it's the taxpayer who’s spending the $1.08 every hour that's worked.

Transport committee  It feels like they're paying twice, in some way. I don't know whether the math is really truthful when you follow that all around, but there's something absolutely wrong with what's going on here.

Transport committee  No, it's not.

Transport committee  The taxpayer is ending up subsidizing these bids. What! And we let this go on.

Transport committee  You’re absolutely on the right track. I think that the unionized contractors will be challenged by that competition in the way that they're not in any environment where they're not having to compete.

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  Absolutely. If there's more competition and there are more eligible people to participate, if unions and those contractors face more competition, I believe they would work hard to find better ways to get better results, so that they could get those jobs.

Transport committee  I agree.