Obviously we don't have insight into every memorandum of agreement, but it's illustrative that in an important case in 2003, the Aliant Telecom case, the board decided that section 87.4, which deals with maintenance activities, is not broad enough for them to require that there be a maintenance and service agreement to cover services necessary to restore outages and what have you. There's not sufficient nexus.
In their conclusion, they said that they did not support a finding that a strike or lockout could result in “immediate and serious danger” to the health or safety of the public if there's a telecom outage. There's no requirement to enter into a maintenance and service agreement.
After that decision was made, there was a subsequent case between Telus and its union. Here there had been a maintenance of services or activities agreement prior to that Aliant Telecom decision. The board said that the union expressed frustration at having entered into that agreement to provide access services after the board had concluded that “the possible interruption of telecommunications services” did not constitute “an immediate and serious danger to the safety and health of the public”. The board further explained that the union considered “that the signing of the agreement weakened its bargaining position and...caused it to be criticized by its membership”.
I don't think you can conclude that there will always be maintenance of activities agreements. That's all we're asking for. We're just saying that if everyone agrees that it's vitally important for Canada that if you're taking away replacement workers when there's an outage, there has to be a mechanism that allows telecommunications and broadcasting rights to restore services in hours, if not minutes.