Thank you, witnesses.
A number of you are opening up a window on some rather unhappy employer-employee relationships, and the government appears to have chosen a route with a sledgehammer to eliminate a number of problems right up front. Mind you, I do have some problems with economists being represented here. They got it so wrong in the past year that maybe they should be punished for an entire lifetime or career.
But let me start with another favourite group, namely the lawyers. You have a very legitimate dispute with the Government of Canada. I completely take your point that your pay relationships are certainly much less than your provincial cousins and much less than your private sector counterparts, although I'm not sure it's a good time to go into private practice in law, given the current economic circumstances.
So the question here really is this. Aside from a complete exemption from Bill C-10, what is the other alternative in terms of solving your dispute? I understand that for the last three years you've been negotiating, negotiating, negotiating, but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. So what are the alternatives?