The study was a very large-scale study of union administrative practices in general. As I said, one of the main findings with regard to reporting and disclosure was overwhelmingly that unions were spending more time on compliance and less time on other duties.
Of them 38%, for example, had to significantly change their accounting practices, 29% had to hire external consultants to comply with the new requirements, and 19% had to hire additional staff to comply with the new requirements. The cost involved for these organizations was very substantial.
This, keep in mind, was simply the cost of compliance with the new Bush regulations that were introduced only for organizations with revenues above $250,000 per year. They would apply to all Canadian labour organizations regardless the level of their revenues. This is time and money paid for by ordinary union members.
As I said, there was never any evidence presented that union members were pushing for this in the first place. There was never any evidence to demonstrate that they received any benefit whatsoever from it afterwards.
We do know something about what union members want from their unions. Harvard economist Richard Freeman has written a very good book called What Workers Want. They want information in very broad terms. They want to know that the union has more money coming in than it has going out. They want to know broadly where it comes from and where it goes to.
The types of revisions instituted during the Bush administration and now being proposed in Canada do not provide them with the kind of information they want. It's not in a useful form. There has never been any evidence that it has actually been used by ordinary union members in the United States.
However, as I said, there is very substantial evidence that it has been used by organizations who have an agenda, who want to weaken unions politically and in other ways. One of the organizations that has used this information most in the United States is the Center for Union Facts, a right-wing organization that lobbies against unions in general and has an agenda to try to undermine unions, politically and otherwise. If it—