Human Resources committee  Every single employer in the country will say that it has a national economic impact on the country if that's in this legislation. The economic impacts of Canada should not be above workers' rights in this country. A worker should have the ability to go on strike, no matter where they are or what they do.

Human Resources committee  Thank you. Terry is a good friend of mine. He's a great trade unionist. I love the guy. He's a fantastic person. Strikes are actually horrible things to go through. In the longshore division in British Columbia, we just went through a 13-day strike. My members did not get paid for one day.

Human Resources committee  I don't mean to be rude, but I don't see the relevance to Bill C-58 when it comes to the unemployment rate in Canada. We're here to talk about anti-scab legislation, not the unemployment rate. I am not here to give one political party or another political party the ability to score points, one against the other, so I'll decline to comment.

Human Resources committee  Thank you, Chair. Good morning from B.C. Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to be before you all today. My name is Rob Ashton. I'm the president of ILWU Canada, which represents 16,000 workers in B.C. and Saskatchewan in a variety of sectors, our largest sector being the maritime sector.

International Trade committee  Let me back you up for a second. I don't represent the members in Montreal, but I will say that the two-year struggle those workers went through was forced upon them by the Maritime Employers Association and their screwing around at the CIRB. It had nothing to do with the workers doing anything nasty.

International Trade committee  For the longshore sector, the last time that I know of when scabs were used—and from 1935 to 1976 I wasn't alive, so bear with me here—was at what we call the Battle of Ballantyne, where the government and the police force used tear gas on the public for the first time ever, and they beat my people and murdered my people.

International Trade committee  I believe so, yes.

International Trade committee  No, it hasn't been settled, quite frankly. What we have done is to protect a part of our workforce that needed protecting, which was our trades workers. Now, when they bring in new equipment, whether it is automated or conventional, we'll be able to do the trades work on that equipment, and they won't be able to farm it out to somebody else.

International Trade committee  In the longshoring industry on the docks, we don't need to automate our terminals. You need to keep people employed. Why does auto manufacturing automate? It's so it can compete with the United States or Mexico. We don't have anybody to compete with. They come to us because we're the best on the west coast.

International Trade committee  A short answer—oh my goodness—is that, yes, we have a strategy that we as a union continually evolve and work on.

International Trade committee  Anti-scab legislation would force our employers to the table, so they couldn't keep working and they couldn't keep earning a profit. It's about everybody feeling a little bit of pain to get the job done more quickly.

International Trade committee  I can't speak a lot about what the international side does, because I'm not directly involved with that. In rounds of bargaining in the longshore industry, cargo diverts. It does. The shipping companies have no ties to any port, unless they own the terminal. They can up and bugger off.

International Trade committee  Right now, the container terminals are slow in B.C., to put it politely. It doesn't have anything to do with our strike. I won't say what I was going to say, because the interpreters.... It has nothing to do with our strike—absolutely nothing. It's the world economy. Shipping is an ebb-and-flow type of situation.

International Trade committee  That is correct. As I said, it's been generations, actually. In 2018 we were in the same position with the BCMEA, because they didn't want to bargain with us then. What we did in 2018 was to have an overtime ban at one terminal, and it was the BCMEA that chose to lock out the entire country, yet today you don't hear people in the employing class and the ruling class screaming bloody blue murder when they lock us out.

International Trade committee  Are you talking about the anti-scab legislation?