International Trade committee  I agree with everything Bruce has said in his comments. He was very eloquent in what he had to say, as he always is. I would just add that this is a continuing issue that needs to be addressed by the private sector and by government going forward. We've seen things in the past

International Trade committee  The answer is yes. I think the best agreements are the ones that are negotiated directly between the union and the management.

International Trade committee  I think the best agreements are the ones negotiated at the table. If that can be done in a reasonably speedy way, it is far and away the best. The situation is that society more broadly is impacted when it can't be done or when a strike results. I think those are issues that have

International Trade committee  I think that was a short-term, temporary thing. That's my understanding. Whether it was the follow-up from the pandemic primarily that led to whatever that global thing was.... They looked at a number of different ports in different parts of the world and ranked them. I don't ha

International Trade committee  Possibly, but I think that ranking was really quite a temporary thing.

International Trade committee  Yes. I think we see that trend quite broadly in various elements of the global supply chain. Certainly, the container shipping lines during the pandemic seemed to really do extremely well. It's reasonable that employees who work for those would say, “Hey, maybe it's time for me

International Trade committee  That's a pretty general question, and looking into the future isn't particularly easy. There will always be a need for longshore workers. I think we can say that no matter what happens with the possibility of more automation, but like almost every business, there are changes in

International Trade committee  Yes, I'll start. The information on that is always somewhat variable, and it may vary from company to company or industry to industry. One of our member companies indicated that for that 13-day strike, there was about a 14-week impact in total. Because things have to start chan

International Trade committee  Yes, I think there is a good case to be made for expanding the definition of an essential service. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the Supreme Court of Canada has always given a very tight definition of an essential service under that section of the Canada Labour

International Trade committee  I haven't heard anything on that.

International Trade committee  I'm not aware if that specific information has been captured anywhere. We've certainly reached out to a number of our member companies. Most of them are fairly large companies, so there really aren't very many small companies that were impacted. The general information is that

International Trade committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair. The Freight Management Association of Canada has been representing the freight transportation interests of Canadian industry to all levels of government since 1916. Despite appearances, I wasn't at the first meeting.

International Trade committee  The FMA is not an industry-specific association. It has a focus on freight transportation by all modes of transport—air, marine, rail and truck—that impact the supply chains of companies in all industries. We have agriculture, mining, manufacturing, food processing and retail com