Mr. Chair, there are six bargaining units at Air Canada that we have been dealing with since I became minister in January 2010. Indeed, in all of them there was a very large amount of effort put in by the officials at Labour Canada, be it through either mediation or conciliation services, and in two of the cases we took extraordinary measures of appointing outside conciliators in order to help the process along. There is much expense, time and effort put into it because, quite frankly, at the end of the day avoiding an impasse and having to utilize valuable time in the House in order to pass legislation of such an extraordinary measure is one that we would like to avoid.
In fact, putting the work in at the beginning is the way we should be doing it. I am very proud of all the efforts we have put into this. Unfortunately, with all the labour that we have put into these files, it has not yielded results in these two cases and that is why we are moving to act today.