Of course, there will be consequences. The government may have conducted fifteen polls over the last week-a government has money to conduct polls-and these polls may have shown that people in English Canada support the Liberals' position, but it has to be careful not to be shortsighted. This situation will have far-reaching effects and the government, having chosen to have working conditions imposed by a third party, will find itself in an awkward situation when it is all over.
I wonder how the government will be able to sell CN if the labour relations climate in that company is what it could become after this move by the government. I hope not, but the climate may not be very good. When employees are legislated back to work and, especially, when they know that their terms and conditions of employment will be determined by a third party, that nothing will be up to them to decide and that vested rights will be dropped, the climate may not be very conducive to efficient privatization.
Furthermore, this government feels it made a tremendous concession by promising, and in fact this is in the bill, to have judges chair the arbitration commissions. I have every respect for judges. I am a lawyer, and I know we have the best judges anyone could wish. The integrity of our judicial system is beyond question, and I am glad to have an opportunity to say this, but because of that integrity, our judges will act according to the mandate they are given.
What will that mandate be? If we look at clause 12, we see that the arbitrators will have an extremely narrow mandate to work with. The arbitrators have no flexibility because they will have to make their decisions strictly on the basis of economic viability and competitiveness in the short and longer term. This means, and I refer to the people who accept these appointments, that their hands are tied, and I know several people who will refuse to sit on these commissions. There are decent people who will refuse to sit under those conditions because they do not have enough latitude to hand down a fair judgment. I am not saying that those who do accept are any less decent, and I have every respect for them, but they will be working within a very restrictive framework where they will have no flexibility and will have to more or less accept the employers' arguments, one by one.
They are going to change the role of the arbitrators as well, or at least try, by turning them into the employers' allies. The Minister of Transport probably had something to do with that as well.
I wish the Minister of Labour, in her initial performance as minister, had been more impervious to the power-hungry demands of the Department of Transport's appetite for power.
We can only hope that everything will turn out well. I hope so. But the trouble with this debate is that the government tried to suppress it. The government tried to suppress the debate. This government does not like debate. It does not like dissenting opinions. This government will only give in to its own impulses.
In concluding, we will vote against this legislation, of course, and we hope that in the future, the Department of Labour will take a more objective stand and will act more responsibly with respect to its obligations to the parties, both employees and employers, because there are not only employers, there are also employees.