I'll just speak to the U.S. experience. Sara is far better qualified than me to speak about the Canadian experience. We had this debate quite thoroughly during the time of the Employee Free Choice Act in the early years of the Obama administration. It was constantly raised by opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act that introducing card certification in the United States would expose employees to union intimidation. In response it was pointed out repeatedly by academics and researchers that there was no empirical evidence to demonstrate that this in fact was a widespread problem. Of course this doesn't mean that it's never, ever happened, and one case is arguably too many. However, compared with the number of cases of alleged employer intimidation of workers in their efforts to get workers to vote against unionization during certification elections, clearly that is a problem that's absolutely endemic in the U.S. system of union certification.
Employer intimidation happens on a very regular basis. I mean, we have very reliable data from the National Labor Relations Board about the number of charges filed each year. There's no question about it, this is not just what unions say. There are many academic studies documenting the level of employer unfair labour practices, which go up and down and were at very high levels in the 2000s and have declined slightly since then.
That is an enormous problem under the current system of mandatory elections in the United States. There are very few documented incidents of union intimidation of workers to sign certification cards. I think it's largely a red herring. However, there are laws against it. Under the laws as they exist, union intimidation is illegal, just as employer intimidation is illegal, so there is a process for dealing with this already. If there are, in fact, cases where the union has engaged in improper pressure and intimidation, there's a process for dealing with that under the law.