Mr. Speaker, honestly, I do not know that we have evidence, but circumstantially, how else can we read the situation?
The employer systematically provoked the situation, and needlessly. I know that many of the Liberal and Conservative speakers have made much of the fact that they have been going so long without coming to a successful negotiation and a successful conclusion, but, and I have pointed it out to this place a few times, it is not uncommon to go a long time without a contract while they are negotiating. They are negotiating, and yet they keep working.
The fact is that in this place, in the House of Commons, we are employers, and our protective service workers went four years without a contract. They were taking job action and wearing badges, wearing ball caps or in other ways breaking the code of how they were to dress. That was the only action they could take. Members can imagine if that was not used against them, that it took four years to negotiate. It was used, and I think the RCMP took way too long to treat our workers fairly within the House of Commons. The fact that they have been talking for two years is no justification whatsoever for deciding that it could not be solved, that it could never be resolved and that it could not find a negotiated solution, and I have just—