Madam Speaker, I did cover the issue of essential services in my speech, but I am happy to elaborate a bit more.
It has been my experience that the employer community and often governments are very willing to tolerate strikes as long as the strikes do not have any real impact on anybody. However, the minute a strike actually starts to have some impact, have some effectiveness, and impacts the community at large, which is the very purpose of a strike, that is when employers and governments move to shut it down.
We saw the previous government, the Conservatives, order Canada Post workers back to work. I think they ordered Air Canada workers back to work. They interfered in free collective bargaining. Just when the workers were beginning to demonstrate to the public the importance of their work and how important their activities were so that when they withdrew their services people actually noticed it, that was when the government wanted to take away their right.
Essential services is an important concept in labour law, but it should be very carefully employed and restricted to only those situations where truly a case can be made that the withdrawal of a service would present a serious threat to the health or safety of the Canadian public. Otherwise, we have to let the economics and the free market determine the outcome in a strike.
Frankly, the New Democrats will always stand up for the right for people in this country to exercise their right to strike when that has been democratically determined, because that is an important right of association in a free and democratic society.