It was a private member's bill that wouldn't have gone through, I believe, if it wasn't for a minority government.
Having said that, we've spent ten years working with your government to rewrite the Canada Labour Code. We've had some rock-em, sock-em debates. We shouldn't be doing this in committee. We've sat down and we've done consensus building on a whole bunch of issues. One of those issues was replacement workers. Now we're hearing that even if you say it's several months...quite frankly, the bill didn't reach second reading until a couple of months ago, or just before the summer, I believe--October, sorry--and it's galloping through.
All I can say is this. This is important to us. The one thing we are is experts on our membership. We do survey them, as you know, and you do get our results, and I'm telling you that our members, when they hear about this bill, are very nervous and very upset about this bill. We've had votes in the past about this, and they will be surprised if this came through. All I'm saying is let's take the time to do it right. If you're getting one side of things...and that's what I've been hearing in this whole committee. It feels like a gang-up to me. That's how I feel. I'm not criticizing anybody, but that's how I feel, and I know our members all feel the same.
We don't feel we've had enough time to present. We were told it was going to committee on Wednesday, I think, and we were told that we may or may not be on the list, and then we were told on I think Thursday that we were going to present.
We've delayed a 12,000-survey response on immigration policy, which is being endorsed by all parties, because we've had to deal with this private member's bill. We've been working on that for a long time. We've been working on things to help the country, we believe. I'm not dismissing this bill, but I have not felt that we've had the time to be able to deal with this bill. And even when you hear presentations, it's big business and big labour. No one ever talks about small and medium-sized enterprises. I've even had some members saying, are you guys under the Canada Labour Code? Yes, we are. Think about it. That's understandable, because part I is focusing primarily on large firms and large workplaces. You didn't know this; you didn't realize it.