Thank you very much for the question.
We've had these services for preventative mediation since about the mid-1990s, and what we've seen from these services is that they're very successful.
I can give you great examples from across the country. In the east, Bell Aliant works with their union, and they went from a really difficult situation with a hard strike and lots of bad feelings to a wonderful working relationship where they deal with issues as they come up. They have no problems bargaining their own collective agreement and having a seamless working relationship.
A lot of it's due to the fact we have officers from FMCS working with them almost on a monthly basis, helping them go through agenda items and keeping the conversation going.
We saw what a great success it was. When you go from the brink of a work stoppage and the potential for violence and lots of acrimony to negotiating a collective agreement at the table prior to it even expiring, it's well worth our taxpayer dollar. It is a great investment.
Building on that, we decided it was a good time and a good place to be able to offer this service more broadly across the country. The department has been a lot more open about advertising the availability of the services. In Burlington a couple of weeks ago we had a workshop that invited lots of federal and not necessarily federally regulated workplace players to the symposium just to describe what preventative mediation is and how it can work.
The key with preventative mediation is that both parties have to agree to submit to it and to work on it. Our pitch is that when you do things, first of all, it's well worth the investment by us, but when the workplace partners do it, it's extremely beneficial to their company and to the lives of the workers.
I'm looking forward to more results. I hope we have great success, because the more time we spend in preventative mediation, the less time we spend in trying to put together collective bargaining agreements in a very acrimonious and sometimes unnecessarily confrontational way.