It's 14 years—it's getting late, and math was never my best subject—and I like to talk, people know that, and I can talk. I can talk a lot, as everybody who knows me knows. I think I probably threatened filibusters—oh, I don't know—20 or 30 times. But the threat was enough that the government of the day gave a little, recognized that it really didn't want to get into that whole big deal: “Listen to him again? Good Lord, we've got to find some way to avoid that”, and we did.
I stand to be corrected, but other than a couple of times...even all participation. I don't think there were more than four, or maybe two, that I played a significant role in, and a couple of others where I went to committee and helped out as a caucus member. That's it. Four times in 14 years, two that I was leading, and I like doing this stuff when I have to do it.
It's kind of hard to make the case that there's abuse, but I could make a great case that having the ability to say—and I have, and you've all been around, in private and in public—“Settle in, folks, because if you're not going to get reasonable we're going to be here a while”. That's when it's like, “Oh no, we don't want to listen, no, especially not to him”, and it worked. It's the same as a strike. You threaten that you're going to have a strike and you've got the attention of the employers, particularly if they've got five brand new contracts that they want to make sure they can fulfill. The idea that there could be a work stoppage is the worst thing, so that provides the motivation, and you get an agreement. Over 90% of the time, they get an agreement. I would say, what, 96% of the time, myself engaged, I found a way to agree, or at the very least I could live with the decision because I deemed the process to be at least as fair as it was going to get.
That's the other thing. It's not just that we expect to win and get what we want. Of course, we haven't put anything on the table yet, because it's all the government's doing so far. We haven't asked for anything, but it's coming. The price of poker keeps going up, the longer this goes on.
I can only hope that the government recognizes that all we want is fairness. If ever there were a word that Canadians were proud to use to identify us—and there are many—one of the things we pride ourselves on is that we're fair-minded people and reasonable. There is nothing reasonable about bringing this in here and denying us the chance to take it to our damn caucus tomorrow. Where's “reasonable” in that? It just piles up one after another after another on this alone. Think about it.
What time was it when we were doing that? I don't know, maybe it was around noon or one o'clock when we were suggesting that, hey, one way we could get past this is at the very least would be to get it to our caucus so we could get a mandate and talk intelligently and have the support of our caucus that what we say would be backed up by our caucus and by our leaders.