On the international stage, our objective is to protect Canadian businesses from unfair competition that could result from the laxness of existing labour standards. The Labour Program has two main thrusts: helping the International Labour Organization to develop international labour standards and developing labour cooperation agreements. Canada has signed 32 International Labour Organization conventions, including four in the past two years. We can come back to this later but, when free trade agreements are negotiated, a labour agreement is negotiated in parallel.
A little earlier, I mentioned that the Canada Labour Code
is divided into three parts. Part I is the labour relations part. It's really where we provide for dispute resolution services in support of collective bargaining for the federally regulated sector.
We do offer some professional mediation and conciliation services to assist the parties for the purposes of renewing or revising their collective agreements. Allow me to say that the interventions of the FMCS, the federal mediation and conciliation service, resulted in over 90% of all settled labour disputes being settled without a work stoppage.
The FMCS also provides preventive mediation workshops and training for businesses under federal jurisdiction.