I'm not a lawyer, but I've certainly been reading the legislation.
It started when I did my Ph.D. thesis on the post office. I didn't intend to get into collective bargaining, but because the post office was at the origin of the introduction of collective bargaining in Canada at the federal level, I ended up spending about a third of the 850 pages on the introduction and evolution, and reading the various acts up to the time of my thesis.
As I said in my opening comments and in my op-ed, I think the balance of power has shifted in the past 45 years. I do not blame the unions, and I want to say that over and over. They did what they're supposed to be doing on the bread-and-butter issues. That's what I'm paying my union dues for. As for where the failure was, it was in successive weak ministers of the Treasury Board who did not, for example, go out and benchmark against the private sector every time in collective bargaining.
I came from the private sector. Even though I've been in the university for 27 years, I was in financial services for 10 years and know a lot of people there, and I'm very sensitive to the fact that I'm a minority. There are only 4 million people in the broader public service sector in Canada, including colleges, universities, health care, and so forth, and there are 14 million people in the private sector who simply do not have the same benefits or the same.... Sixty per cent of people in the private sector don't even have a pension, and we have gold-plated pensions.
To answer your question, I think the balance of power has shifted in the past 40 years, and I think it's very difficult for any government or any political party to try to bring it back, because while human beings are upwardly mobile, we're distinctly anti-downwardly mobile.