Thank you. Terry is a good friend of mine. He's a great trade unionist. I love the guy. He's a fantastic person.
Strikes are actually horrible things to go through. In the longshore division in British Columbia, we just went through a 13-day strike. My members did not get paid for one day. My bargaining committee didn't get paid for one day. The changes and the effects they have on families are detrimental in the worst way. People can lose their houses, and if the strikes are long enough, people, through mental illness, can lose their lives. Strikes are the last choice for workers in unions.
We want a fairly negotiated collective agreement at the table, and reached as fast as can be done, surprisingly, so we can carry on with our business, and our business is doing our job—period, end of story.
In the Maritimes sector when we deal with our employer associations, a lot of us don't see our employers at the table; we see a third party at the table, so we can't have direct conversations with them. That's what drags things out and causes the issues at the bargaining table, because we're not allowed to have direct conversations with our direct employers because the third parties won't bring them in.
That slows bargaining down and creates a problem at the table, which, in our last round of bargaining, was what caused the 13-day strike. Every one of my members voted individually for their families, for a better life and for a freely negotiated collective agreement. For every worker in Canada who votes to go on strike, it is the last thing they want to do.