My final thought in my presentation was that we saw the same trends in B.C., and I was going to end there.
Let's break it down. To understand the context about why strikes occur and why we see an increase or decrease in strikes, I'll note they cannot be correlated to one single legislative act or one single act.
In 1977, when the Government of Quebec introduced it's anti-scab bill, it did so for very specific reasons. The Quebec construction industry was notoriously complicated. There had been some serious strikes with some serious acts of violence. The government acted in a way to try to prevent that. While we saw an increase in strikes in the next two years, they started to decline—and declined precipitously. One reason for that was the structural change in the economy. We moved from the Keynesian welfare era to a different type of era where markets were more free and so on. We saw a decline in strikes, which ended up seeing fewer and fewer people in private sector unions.
We saw similar trends after 1993, when the government of Mike Harcourt introduced an anti-scab bill similar in context to that of the Quebec government. Actually, 1993, if we start there, is the high point for strikes. After that, they decline precipitously in British Columbia, and they have never been matched since then.
I don't see the evidence that one legislative act leads to more strikes or longer strikes. It's actually much more complicated than that, and I'm not convinced by the evidence in those briefs, Mr. Sheehan.
My final thought is on the issue of longer strikes. That's a bit more complicated, because we do see a few longer strikes after anti-scab legislation, but we see periods of shorter strikes as well. This would lead me to conclude that, again, it's context-specific. How do we understand that? We look at each specific strike and try to see what the issues are and what's happening on the ground.
To conclude, we know for sure that when anti-scab legislation is introduced, we see fewer incidents of violence on the picket line. I think that's an important policy objective of the Canadian government's industrial relations framework.