Mr. Speaker, I should let the House know that my mother is a dues-paying, card-carrying union member of CAW as well. I, therefore, have great respect for the movement and I take the matter very seriously.
The question of why we are acting now goes to the heart of why we are acting quickly. It always comes back to the economy.
We have been intensely discussing the matter with the parties over the past number of months. Should a strike or a lockout occur there would be a serious effect on the travelling public and on the economy. They anticipated that would be seven days. If we look through the history of legislation, we can see that oftentimes it takes between seven and nine days to deal with matters of such importance. We thought it would be more appropriate to put the notice on the order paper in anticipation of what would happen. It is no different from other back to work legislation in the past.
Since 1950, the House has passed back to work legislation 32 times. A number of those times have been with respect to private companies. However, the remaining factor that binds them all is the national significance of the work stoppage and the effect on the Canadian population. Those two factors guided us in our deliberations on this matter. We take it very seriously.
I will make one last point. Our role in Labour Canada is to facilitate and prevent these things from happening and over 90% of the time we are successful.