Mr. Speaker, by stubbornly making working conditions worse for railway employees, the federal government could be shooting itself in the foot.
As Jean-Robert Sansfaçon wrote in today's Le Devoir : ``The current option of mediation-arbitration denies the right to strike without ensuring a satisfactory settlement. This approach could even aggravate the crisis in the railway industry and prevent the privatization of CN''.
By trampling the rights of workers, being inflexible and refusing to make the slightest concession regarding the arbitrators' mandate, the government may have done what it should have avoided at all cost, namely causing labour relations at CN to deteriorate on the eve of this company's privatization.