It won't be the apocalypse. I don't believe it will. We have to remember that federally regulated employers are not all huge businesses. There are many small and medium-sized businesses operating in support roles in the aviation and shipping sectors and so forth, which may be federally regulated. So it's not just these monster organizations. There is a bit of a fictional notion that large organizations are capable of withstanding any degree of economic hardship. I think we have to get past the notion that they should.
Ms. Davies made a point that I think is very important, and I want to be clear. Please don't characterize the negative view about this particular bill as necessarily a negative view about everything with respect to labour. The labour system actually does work. It's a balance. I know. I work in it. I watch it work.
If my clients suffer strikes, the other party suffers strikes. That's the point of a strike. The reason the parties don't go to strike is that they know what the effects of it will be on each other.
If we alter the instrument of the strike in the fashion described here, the effect will be simple. Almost all the pain, or a substantial amount of the pain, will be felt by one party instead of by both, because one party will be rendered incapable of functioning and the other will not. The other will still be able to get work, still be able to get strike pay. It's not good. It's not pretty, I know; it isn't, but that is a profound imbalance. I don't know what the effects on the willingness of people to invest, to put their money at risk, will be. These are all incremental things. They go to the nature of the quality of our enterprise, the quality of our environment to accept business risk.
Those things aren't nothing. Those are very real, and this law has struck a chord with a lot of folks in what you would call the business community, because they recognize what it means. They recognize that it is, as I keep saying, distortion and that it is disrespectful to the labour law methodology that we have adopted in this country.
I can't imagine that folks on the other side of this issue would like to be unilaterally treated to the counter-law that will inevitably come if this becomes law, because what do we expect to happen? Another Parliament will have to fix it, and goodness knows what they'll do. This shouldn't be a volleyball. Labour relations are too important to the economy to become a political volleyball. They're a very intricate and delicate thing. They are literally a house of cards.