Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned in my speech, there are 25,000 employees at Air Canada outside of these two union groups who will be affected by the stoppage. There are also another 250,000 Canadian families that will be indirectly affected by a work stoppage. Moving forward on this helps to ensure that the 25,000 Air Canada employees who are not involved in these two unions and the 250,000 Canadians who are indirectly affected by this, will continue to work. Most importantly, we need to understand that this affects millions of Canadian families. We need to ensure that those families know we are taking action for them to protect the national economy and their jobs.
In the House of Commons on March 12th, 2012. See this statement in context.