My understanding of the Alberta scheme after the 2008 reforms were brought in is that the unions, rather than subsidizing the bid of a contract directly, went to subsidizing benefits for workers, which forms, in many respects, the same type of a subsidy to allow them to underbid work.
Let me see, then, if I can follow how the money flows here, if you will. So the taxpayer's dollar is taken in, say, by a municipality. Through their collective bargaining agreement with unions, the funding for a project goes in, and those payments to the union are then put into a market enhancement recovery fund or a STAB fund, or whatever you want to call it, and then used to help subsidize the wages or something else in order to get a bid. So the taxpayer money goes in at the top and there's an advantage given to unionized bidders versus non-unionized bidders that allows them to get the contract from the same taxpayer who pays the money. Is that how the scheme works?