Thank you. I want to reiterate that I think for mature labour relations to take place, there has to be a level playing field, and this provides some of that.
What I was going to say was that the difference in the legislation as I understand it.... I'm no lawyer or legal expert on this, but I certainly have lived through many strikes and lockouts. The difference is that under our labour code and this provision, you can bring in replacement workers from the existing work force, which means that the door is open for that to happen.
That has led to a lot of disputes. Employers have been known to pump up their numbers before the bargaining begins so that they have enough people. They bring people in specifically to do that, and there is a question of who is an employee and at what point. You get a lot of legal wrangling about who is and who isn't an employee.
Let me just say that where that has happened, in my experience with the disputes I have been called in to help with as the president of the Federation of Labour, the toughest ones to solve are the ones where you have a handful of workers who decide to follow the boss's lead and, for whatever reason—good, bad, or ugly—have gone to work. Now the dispute is no longer over getting a collective agreement. It's what to do with the people who went to work.
The boss is totally ingrained with supporting those people, because they have been loyal. The people outside, which is usually the vast majority, are pretty angry. And so now you have this division, such that you're spending all your time trying to figure that problem out and not solving what the dispute was over to start with.
Most of those places haven't successfully operated, and so my appeal is, don't try to do it half-assed. That was a compromise with the business community at the time, I guess, to get the legislation. We didn't support it. We wanted the outright ban.
So I think you have to look at what you are trying to accomplish. What you are trying to accomplish is mature labour relations. Our labour code is different in that sense—it leaves that door open—and in fact it is a weakness, in our situation in British Columbia, that this present government hasn't run to fix for us.
On the Telus dispute, there's no question in my mind that it made a longer, uglier dispute. The feeling in the labour movement is that if you bring in replacement workers, you're out to bust the union, because it's so hard to put back together at the end of it—the labour relations are so ugly—that it's not a place to do it.
To suggest for a second that we're going to bring in replacement workers to run airlines and run the docks and do all that stuff, and that if we don't do this—if we pass this law—then these people won't be able to do that, is ridiculous. You won't do it. It would be a war, and it's a war we don't need. We need good labour relations.
So I don't think at this point.... We are talking about a small handful of employers who abuse the situation around collective bargaining, who are not committed to a progressive and productive relationship with their employees. Most of the people represented at this table would never dream of doing it. Most laws, though, we make for the people who behave in bad ways, not good ways.
In my time in British Columbia I've never seen the government use replacement workers in a public sector strike. I've just never seen it. Stephen Harper may want to do that. It's a possibility, and maybe this law wants to leave the door open for that, but I think most people have figured out it's a bad idea. All we're saying is, let's make sure it's a bad idea for everybody.