I have two comments on the labour negotiations issue.
First, labour negotiations take place, I'm proud to say, in a fundamentally democratic environment. That is to say, as I said earlier, the proposals are prepared by the membership, as a general rule, they are negotiated by a committee, and then they are brought back to the membership for ratification. I think the analogy between a broad inter-state trade agreement and collective bargaining is to some extent obviously not an ideal one. When governments—sovereign, democratically elected governments—engage in important treaty negotiations, the standard of broad-scale consultation should probably, it would seem to me, exceed that of a private negotiation between a union and an employer.
I want to make one other brief comment in respect of Canadian employers. You and I may or may not agree about the normative merits of Canadian employers, but I can tell you this. It's not so much that Canadian employers are bad or good, but I can tell you that I have on numerous occasions sat across the table from Canadian employers who came to their workers and said, “You need to take concessions”, or “You need to give up your defined benefit pension plan”, or “You need to take concessions on benefits”, or “You need to take wage concessions.” Why? “Because we have other operations”—in Mexico or China—“where wage rates are a quarter to a fifth of the wage rates we are paying you.”
That doesn't necessarily make an employer a bad or a good person. It's not a question of whether employers are good or bad; it's a question of the fact that employers are looking—and this is what employers do—to minimize their wage costs and make as much money as they can. They're charged with the responsibility to do that, and if they can do it by moving operations.... We have a serious—