Thank you.
Thank you to all the witnesses here today.
I'm going to continue with Monsieur Murray.
We've heard a narrative here throughout this study that Canada's reputation is tattered and then a list of reasons why: that it's the pandemic, that it's climate change, the atmospheric rivers and the fires, and then that it's this strike we had in Vancouver. We haven't had a strike at the port of Vancouver since 1969, so things have been going well there. In 2010, as we heard in our last meeting, the BCMEA, this group of employers, ran the negotiations for the employers. They weren't the decision-makers, and that has caused delays.
I'm not sure if that was the reason why workers were locked out in 2018, but we heard from the union in Vancouver that they would put in their response to a position within a day and it would take seven or 10 days for the employer to come back. That's what causes these delays.
It seems that everybody is quick to blame labour for a labour disruption when we have container shipping companies and container ports around the world making record profits and we see inflation at record levels. The workers want a share of those profits to be able to handle that inflation, because they want to continue living acceptable lives, yet they're the ones who get the blame when the employers don't negotiate in good faith, it seems, or at least not in an efficient way.
I'm wondering if you could comment on that bit of a rant of mine, especially around this narrative that it always seems to be the union's fault when there's a strike.