Thank you very much.
I want to thank all our guests for coming at such short notice to give testimony and to educate us on many of these issues.
My first question was going to be who has been consulted, and it's very obvious that nobody has been consulted, neither the employer nor the employees. This legislation didn't go anywhere. As a matter of fact, I was reading this document today which says that officials with the Treasury Board told the Commons finance committee yesterday that they could not recall any consultation with anyone outside government in rewriting the Canada Labour Code and the Public Service Labour Relations Act. For me, that in itself is a huge shocker, that when you have something like this, nobody was consulted.
The other thing is that I know health and safety and how it works, having come from a system and knowing it well, and one of the things that has always worked with health and safety is the collaboration and consultation between employers and employee representatives. It has always been in a workplace very much a collaborative thing.
My first question is for Mr. Farrell of FETCO.
Do you think that employer and worker representatives should have been consulted prior to the law being amended?