Mr. Speaker, I suspect there is a little red light and a bell that goes off in the Conservative lobby every time a Conservative MP says “big union bosses”. It seems to pepper every one of their speeches.
I would like to clarify this for my friend. He may not have ever attended a union meeting of any kind. However, on the idea that an outside big union boss, according to the Conservatives, would be able to come to into a room full of nurses and tell them how to vote, my friend has a deep misconception of how nurses and union members in our country think, which is entirely independent of what their leadership may or may not say on a given election.
The acts the Conservatives brought in were going to cost the Canadian taxpayer more than $21 million and were opposed by not just every labour union in the country, but were opposed by the Canadian Bar Association and the NHL Players' Association. My friend can hate on hockey and I will let him take that defence if he wants, but if what he was looking for was accountability and transparency, I would have suggested that the Conservatives could have started with themselves. They gave us every Senate scandal for the last 10 years. They were unable to account for the three-quarters of a billion dollars they spent on self-promoting ads. A little do as we say, not as we do was the Conservative agenda.
If we want to have labour peace in our country, allow unions to form as they always have.