Mr. Speaker, I have great respect for you as a Speaker and I think you are doing an excellent job showing some of these new MPs the differences among the various rules in the House of Commons so I want to commend you for your excellent role this morning.
I listened to my hon. colleague's speech with great interest, because during the election I was standing outside the Tim Hortons in South Porcupine, Ontario and a young guy came up to me and he said, “Charlie, if this government gets a majority how long do you think it will be before we see Wisconsin north?”
I said, “Well, you know exactly what will happen if they get a majority”.
If members look at what happened in Wisconsin, it is very similar to the situation here. It was an attack on public-sector workers. It was an attempt to demonize them using the terms “union thugs” and “union bosses”. It was an attack on their pensions. That was the thin edge of the sword. We see now the attack on CUPW, the attack on the pensions, the two-tiered system.
I am getting emails from firefighters, from nurses and from people who work in the public sector all across Canada, who ask why it is that the government would try to impose a wage settlement that would undermine what had already been agreed to. Does the member not think this is an attempt by the government to bring forward the same kind of retrograde actions against workers that happened in Wisconsin?