Clearly, in the context of Bill C-377, in addition to the privacy concerns listed by the Privacy Commissioner, we realized that this bill was going to require us to reveal all kinds of information that no jurisdiction in this country has ever had to in terms of law, except the jurisdiction that came forward with this. More importantly, from our perspective, this bill overreaches into the provincial territory, which is a violation of the Constitution. The Constitution recognizes the provinces' prerogative to regulate labour relations within their jurisdictions. This bill overreaches and uses the Income Tax Act to do it, of all things, in the first place. For many of our organizations, under the federal labour code, if members require financial information from their union and the union refuses to provide that information, they can ask the board to force the union to disclose that information. There have been few, or next to no, cases listed by the board where a union has refused to comply with the requirement of an order issued by the board. That's currently in the current federal labour code. In regard to Bill C-525, we saw this as a bill that had more to do with ensuring that union growth in this country would remain stagnant at a federal level. It would deliberately ensure that workers would have more difficulty in getting their unions certified, because the bill provides ample opportunity for third parties and employers to interfere with that delicate process.
We have always said that if a worker doesn't want to join a union, they don't have to sign a union card. If a majority of workers within a workplace don't want to have their union continue to represent them, they can simply file an application before the Canada Labour Relations Board and a union can lose its rights to represent those workers. Not once during this process did the members on the government side demonstrate that the current system was was flawed. It was amended through a thorough examination led by the Sims task force. Both the CLC at the time and FETCO, the federal employees group, were highly involved in that and were consulted before the law was changed back in the 1990s.