Yes. I think that's absolutely problematic with this legislation.
The federal sector is not like any other labour jurisdiction in Canada. It houses the federal backbone: transportation, communications, banking—
The board favours national bargaining units, so the organizations that are unionized tend to be national in scope. So from coast to coast, you're covering their entire operations. So it's not simply a single plant in a single town that's under a bargaining unit, which would be typical under a provincial certification, where they have plant-by-plant certification. We tend to have large companies operating across the nation, operating very critical services across transportation, communications, or ports and those things.
The proposed bill, as I understand it, talks really about replacement workers being people brought in—“strangers”, I guess, is the term that's being used. But it goes beyond that. It covers employees already employed by the company in that bargaining unit who choose not to go on strike, which is a significant issue for us in terms of freedom of association. That's the issue that I had raised. It's a fundamental issue, which we have to come to grips with.
It also deals with contractors working in the establishment. The language of the proposed bill talks about the “establishment”. The establishment, under the code, is a defined term. An establishment is a geography of the employer's organization. It really limits the use of managers across establishments, which are defined in geographical terms. But in the national scope of a bargaining unit where the employees on strike could be across that bargaining unit, that sort of thinking severely compromises an employer's ability even to use its own managers. Of course, contractors are also prohibited, even though they seem to be contractors who were previously engaged, prior to the work stoppage, in that establishment.
So it's much broader than some of the discussion today that seems to suggest that it's just people coming in from the outside temporarily to work during the strike. I think it's much broader than that.