Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Wetaskiwin for his question. He raises a very good point.
When we talk about emergency back to work legislation or essential services we usually think about health care workers like doctors or the police force. If they remove their services we could have chaos, death or serious injury that is unattended to.
We have never really considered the impact of our labour-management resolution process when it comes to industries at risk. We cannot necessarily categorized it as having an impact on public safety, for instance, or as bringing the country's security into question. That is not the case but it is just as real a problem.
The member raised a very real problem which is why I agree with him. Economic issues should be considered when we are discussing and putting forward this type of legislation, in particular where innocent third parties are affected.
If we had good train and port facilities on the four borders of the country and the west coast were on strike, we could go to Mississippi or Churchill or the east coast. We would have other options and we would not need legislation.
That is not the way it works. Almost all our product goes to the west coast or through the St. Lawrence. The greater amount goes through west coast ports. There is no other way. We need to make more ways and we are in favour of making more ways to get our product to port and to our customers. The infrastructure in place is not adequate to allow competition to have its proper role in the marketing and transportation of our goods.
With that restriction upon our industry it is important that we have a resolution mechanism in place to prevent serious economic injury which can almost reach the intensity of being harmful to public safety. We need that resolution mechanism in place in such serious instances as the shutting down of an entire industry through labour disruption.