Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I'm going to come back to proposed subsection 94(2.4), because it is an important thing for us to try to figure out here. I don't know why it is that the English version makes reference to “The measures referred to in subsection (2.2)”, but subsection 94(2.2) isn't even mentioned in the French version of the article. This leaves me a bit baffled.
But if we go back to proposed subsection 94(2.2), what it's talking about is the kinds of employees whose services an employer may use during a strike or lockout. It talks about a person employed as a manager, superintendent, or foreman, and so forth, or a person who is a director or an officer. It says these are the kinds of people you can use during a strike or lockout, but then it says in proposed subsection 94(2.4) that the measures referred to “shall exclusively be conservation measures”.
It seems to be saying in this section that these people who a company can use can only be used to conserve, to do painting, to do maintenance, and so forth, of the aircraft or the buses, or whatever it may be, but not to actually provide goods and services. So that seems to me to be a problem, one that we have to try to perhaps discuss with legislative counsel, and so forth, in the future. I'm open to comments on that.
But let me ask another question. One of the things we've been hearing, and in fact the chairman and I last night had a meeting with the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association. They, like many groups that this committee has heard from over the past few months, were talking about the skills shortage and the difficulty they're having getting workers. We heard about a restaurant in Mr. Lake's home province of Alberta where they had actually provided a house, and had provided someone else with a car, in order to get them to come from Manitoba or other places to work at the restaurant, to try to have enough employees.
We're hearing about this kind of thing more and more across the country. It strikes me that we are seeing ourselves in a new era. Throughout my lifetime, and throughout the lifetime of most of us in this room, we've had a situation where there weren't enough jobs for Canadians, and now suddenly we have a time when there aren't enough Canadians for the jobs. There are still certainly Canadians who don't have jobs, and that remains a very important problem for us to try to address in a variety of ways, but we are seeing a whole new era, which may be changing the balance between workers and employers. If we have employers who are having to offer a lot more in order to get employees, it suggests that.
I'd like your comment on whether or not that in itself is altering the balance, as we try looking at this bill, to figure out what the heck the balance should be in relation to the issue of replacement workers. I'm going to leave it to all of you to answer that. I'm afraid you're going to have to answer briefly, because—