Okay, that's fair, Madam.
What I hear you saying is that at the end we don't know how much we chased. The provinces said there was an impact, but we're not sure what the impact was. We entered into negotiations on a good-feel basis, in the sense that this should be a good relationship-building thing, but we don't know how much we get out of it.
There is an impact at the end of the day, right? The impact for Canadian workers is whether or not they work. That's really what I'm asking. If we didn't know how much we lost, we're not sure how much we got, and we don't know how many people lost or gained jobs, so how do we measure this?
I'm not trying to be cruel about it, but when I talk to my constituents, they say to me, “Well, we got a new agreement. Did we get any jobs?” I say, “You know, it's really hard to count this. We don't know.”
Really, that's what I've heard so far. We don't know how much it was worth, we don't know how much we got, and we don't know what the impact was from the provincial level. They couldn't tell us how much we were going to lose. Dalton McGuinty couldn't say to us, “Well, you know we've lost x number of jobs because of Buy American”--not the old Buy American but the new one, the recovery act.
At the end of it, we don't have any hard data at all that tells Canadians this is something that ended up as a benefit to us. We think it is, from what I'm hearing, but you're not sure it is, because at least to this point you haven't been able to put together any data, and if I'm hearing you correctly I'm not sure you could tell me that you could absolutely put it together if given enough time to do so. It seems it would just be that difficult to do. So I guess I'm asking how we bargain something when we don't know what we're going to get.
I used to bargain collective agreements. I kind of knew what I was asking for. I kind of knew what the other side had. I kind of knew what I wanted to get, and at the end, I had something in my hand. I could say I lost two cents or I got three cents. I'm hearing, “We didn't know if there was a nickel out there to get. We don't know if we lost any jobs or gained any jobs, and we don't know if we got a nickel taken out of our pocket at the end or if we got the dime.” That's what I've heard so far.
You can help me be corrected on that, because I'd be happy to be corrected on that, but so far that's what I've heard, to be honest, when it comes to hard data. Again, I don't mean to be mean. So let me move away from that, because we're sort of going around on the data piece.
In the negotiations, did we look at any sort of dispute systems in the sense of how we resolve these? As Mr. Brison correctly pointed out, there are a gazillion exclusions all over the place, whether in the States or up here: we're going to exclude this; we're going to exclude that. I think we all know that when we start to make exclusions, that can lead to someone saying, “I don't think it was that piece we meant to exclude. It was maybe that other piece.” Then we get into the debate about whether it was that or it was not that. How do we resolve those disputes that obviously creep up? Heavens, they creep up all the time between the provinces and the federal government, never mind cross-border provinces, states, and municipalities. I was wondering what we looked at in that regard.