Yes. I've been the union's negotiator for this group since 2007, so I was there in 2012. What happened was that from our perspective—I don't expect these folks to agree—we don't think the employer was properly applying the collective agreement. From our perspective, what was negotiated was that years of service in the Canadian Forces would count for the accrual of vacation time, meaning the amount of vacation you could access on an annual basis. This meant that if you were working in the public service, you were covered by the collective agreement, and you had spent time in the Canadian Forces, you were going to get a bump now in the amount of paid leave you could get in a given year.
That change that we negotiated got taken by the Canada Border Services Agency to mean that we're now going to change how people choose their vacations and change the definition of seniority. We filed a grievance. We were unsuccessful. Consequently, in the last round of bargaining, we modified the collective agreement to reflect the initial intent.
You know, the union has never taken the position that people with Canadian Forces service should lose vacation accrual; we support that completely. The membership took issue with what was being implemented—two separate seniority definitions. That was not what got negotiated, so we negotiated something different. That has now been reinforced twice by the membership through democratic means.
