My understanding is that it was in the last collective agreement. For whatever reason it got written out of, or somehow was written out of, the current agreement.
The union put out an email and information and said that they were taking, in their opinion, the unprecedented step of putting it to a vote. They don't usually put things like this to a vote. The union would just take a position or a stand and represent the bargaining agent in the negotiations. They put it to a vote.
If the wording in the collective agreement should remain as it is, in which case it is not included service in the federal public sector, or if they should try to reword it to put it back in, to include it, that vote went out. I don't know the exact number of border services officers across Canada but there were 1,150, give or take, who voted no and 850 voted yes. That represents, as a total, less than 50% of any and all eligible voters.
I've talked to officers and many have apologized to me. They said that they didn't see how this could happen, that it seemed ridiculous. Fair enough. There were other officers who said they didn't even hear about the vote, and they wondered when it happened, how it went out, and how the information was disseminated.
There was also misinformation. The Treasury Board policy for annual leave is on a scale. It's not day for day. There are different classes of services—regular force, reserve, reserve overseas deployed. There's a whole scale and you submit your paperwork. If you get hired in the public sector, you submit your paperwork from the military and they calculate it and give you annual leave based on that. It's not day for day.
I don't think that was clear. The biggest concern, unfortunately, on the part of a lot of officers was about losing seniority, in picking their holidays or their shifts, to guys from the military, guys who chose to be in the military. There have been negative comments made publicly, out loud on the work floor, amongst officers. That's where I get the animosity. They tell us that, after all, we chose to be in the military, and the military's not the public sector, so it doesn't count. They say we were never in the union or part of the collective agreement.
I don't know what the information was. I don't think that if it had been better disseminated.... Only a fraction of the officers would actually be military members. For military members, not all their service counts, so you're talking a fraction of a fraction.