Mr. Masse, thank you for your question, because it will illustrate this. What's important for everybody to understand—and the Teamsters and Unifor are aware of this as well—is that the current situation that we find ourselves in with grocery store workers is that the downturn in the value of this work occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the entrance of multinational Walmart.
What occurred then was that for the first time in Canada, we had a situation of a deep discount. They paid less, they provided no benefits and they competed with the large chains that have since consolidated. As Jerry said earlier, there's been a huge consolidation, but they competed, because what we referred to as “conventional stores” that had meat departments, bakeries and full-service checkout people who took your groceries out to your car, with the new model from Walmart, their slogan was “Always low prices”, “The lowest price is the law” and “We're price dropping”.
What happened in Canada was a huge entrance into what they call discount and deep discount stores: Food Basics and No Frills, as you mentioned. What occurred is they set them up to deal with these other issues, and we've seen a decline in conventional stores.
You're absolutely correct. If you have a conventional store, like a Fortinos or an Extra Foods, you'll see that those collective agreements are superior and the rates of pay and benefits are superior to those at the deep discount stores like No Frills and Food Basics.