Thank you, Mr. Keddy.
The reference to Runnymede was really a reference to my op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen about a year ago on how English-speaking democracy has evolved over 800 years. It has evolved a whole series of checks and balances over a very long period of time. It wasn't a one-off on one magic day and then everything was fixed in stone.
To answer your question...and I really do believe this is an enhancement, not a derogation—not a diminution, an enhancement. Before, if a worker...and by the way, there's the provincial system. People may not realize that this is parallelled at the provincial level across Canada. There's a very similar system at the provincial level to what is being proposed at the federal level in this bill. I know, because I'm in university and I'm under the provincial system, with workforce committees and so forth.
The current system—and I've spoken to people privately about this—is very informal. A worker perceives danger and goes to the employer, and the employer doesn't agree. There's a lot of verbalizing going on, but there's no paper trail; there's no record. As an academic who studies public policy, I think having a paper trail, a record of decision, a record of conversations, a record of the evidence, is very important, as opposed to this verbal “I said this, you said that”. By the time Labour Canada gets involved, it's six or eight months later and people don't remember what they said in the meeting when they were yelling and shouting at each other.
So what this is going to do is impose what I would call due process—really good, empirical due process on this whole process of adjudicating it. I really am mystified as to why public sector unions or private sector unions are opposed. They're going to have more leverage under this system than under the current system.