I thought you were kidding.
In the movie, anyway, the breaking point, when they concluded that the captain was actually nuts, was when he went crazy about who ate all his strawberries. He was practically ready to hang the crew to find these damn strawberries, so it was just an indication of somebody who went off his nut. I thought that was somewhat apropos because I don't understand what the government's doing. It makes no darn sense.
Prorogation is another example of what they could have done if they had been sincere about trying to find a way. Let's remember this is not a promise. In fact, this is the opposite of the promise the government made. If this was a government promise, like legalizing marijuana and its coming to the committee, there's a different dynamic taking place there. The government ran on it. They can claim they have a legitimate public mandate to bring it in. It's government legislation and it follows the usual process. This is not that at all. This is about how our House runs. This is about how our committees run. Most importantly, this is about what tiny bit of real influence.... I won't even call it power, because it's not. It's influence, and they want to remove that.
Now, I had mentioned earlier about how filibusters were similar to strikes. I see them as very similar. I haven't yet heard the government argument, by the way. We haven't heard a single argument on what's in their discussion paper, but somehow they think that filibusters are happening all the time and it's wrecking the ability and it's obstructionist. I'm assuming that's what they're going to say, yet the reality is that much like strikes, while they get a lot of attention when they happen, they're actually few and far between. Why? And I've been there; I know. The threat of a strike provides motivation for both sides to find a compromise. In a strike no one wins. As soon as you strike, you lose. You may win your objective, but make no mistake, the company is losing production and workers are not getting paid. How can that be a win for anybody? Yet sometimes it's necessary.
I forget the numbers. If somebody has them, they can help me. It's provincial mostly, because most of our agreements are provincial. But I think the rate of collective bargaining resulting in an agreement with no strike—and I stand to be corrected—is 92% or 93%, maybe even higher. There's no lost time, sometimes not even a lot of ill will. If you remove the right to strike, you're not going to get those same kinds of agreements. You would end up reducing the union to having to find other means to put pressure on the government. That's opening up a whole lot of other problems. That's not a good answer. But people who are desperate for fairness, and a lot of us came here speaking for those folks, are going to take desperate measures.
The ability to strike doesn't mean that everybody's going on strike every time you have negotiations, and it doesn't mean that every single set of negotiations is going to fail and lead to a strike, and the unions are going to be saying, “Oh, we got all this power and we're going to use it.” That's not what happens. That's not the real world, and I would say the same thing about the filibuster. Yes, right how we're having to use it. Thank goodness we have it.