Mr. Chairman, we have been hearing a lot about this whole issue of final offer selection in the last couple of weeks. I think virtually everybody who has risen to speak on it first prefaced their remarks by saying there is no substitute for a freely negotiated settlement. I think we are all in agreement on that, even the mover of this amendment.
The whole idea of final offer selection is a choice that some people make in the course of labour management negotiations and it has its place in a very limited application.
As such, even in this round of bargaining, had the two parties agreed that it was a suitable way to resolve the issue they could have opted for it at any time in the process. Both the Canada Labour Code and the collective agreement in effect have provisions that if the two parties agree they may settle their outstanding issues by any type of binding arbitration. Final offer selection is only one of those types of binding arbitration.
I have personally used final offer selection as a union representative in the province of Manitoba. Final offer selection was law in that province for six or seven years. The NDP introduced it. It survived four or five years until the Filmon government was elected and then it was chucked out. As a union representative in the dozens of union negotiations I conducted we may have used it three or four times. In a limited application we see its use.
The whole premise is that when we have narrowed down all the outstanding issues to a couple of simple straightforward issues like money possibly the two parties could see fit to use it. Even in the province of Manitoba it was optional. Either side could make application to the minister to solve its outstanding issues either 60 days prior to a strike or 90 days after a strike. Those were the windows during which we could opt for this FOS.
United Food and Commercial Workers Union used it a lot. CUPE was vehemently opposed to the idea. The steelworkers played with it as did the carpenters union. I might have used it a maximum of five times over the course of seven or eight years.
Final offer selection had its origins in pro baseball and it is still used there. After the union negotiated all the outstanding issues except for money and the two parties still did not have the monetary package resolved, the employees put in their final offer and the employer puts in its last offer. The arbitrator can choose one or the other but not a combination of both. There is no cafeteria style shopping here. It is one or the other.
We should try to transpose that into the type of bargaining we see at Canada Post. Anybody with any sense of or any background in labour relations would see immediately that there would be pandemonium. It simply could not be done in negotiations that involved a complex set of rules of work or issues the current round of bargaining has been bogged down in. There is simply no way in the world that FOS would be useful, which is why the very experienced people at the table have chosen not to exercise their right to settle this round of negotiations with final offer selection.
To follow the recommendation put forward in this amendment and to institutionalize FOS so that all negotiations from hereon forward will be resolved by FOS would be absolutely ludicrous. It indicates to me a lack of knowledge of the subject. It is as if somebody stumbled on a new idea and decided to give it a whirl. There is media attention so the idea is being milked over and over again until most of us on this side of the House are sick of hearing about FOS. If I never hear the word again it will be too soon.
I speak very strongly against any such introduction. The only latitude we would see necessary in the Canada Labour Code would be in the ability of the two parties, should they see fit, to conclude their negotiations through the process of binding arbitration. One of those offers may be final offer selection.