Take a long lunch. Maybe work on your golf swing. Tell you what -- why don't you just take the rest of the week off? Come back Monday. Or whenever.

By all the usual signs, Parliament will have been dissolved by then, leaving any laws that have not yet received Royal Assent to die on the order paper.

There's a particular piece of legislation whose untimely death would be most welcome: Bill C-66, An Act to Amend the Canada Labour Code (etc.), Labour minister Alfonso Gagliano's personal gift to organized labour. All but unnoticed, the bill quietly passed third reading in the House of Commons earlier this month. Its fate now rests with those overworked Senators.

If you want to know what is wrong with C-66, just ask the workers at Wal- Mart Canada's store in Windsor, Ontario. The store recently became the first of 2600 in the Wal-Mart chain to be unionized, which would be more of a victory for labour if the decision did not run directly contrary to the wishes of the people who actually work there. In a secret ballot, store employees voted by a margin of more than three to one -- 151 to 43, if you're scoring -- against certification. But that was not quite margin enough for the Ontario Labour Relations Board, which promptly ordered the workers to welcome the United Steelworkers of America as their new bargaining agent.

The board has the power to order certification, even over the express opposition of the workers themselves, if it believes employees were influenced by what are known in the trade as "unfair labour practices," i.e. if the company fights back. If, for example, management were to suggest the union's arrival might cause it to think twice about keeping the store open, that would be an unfair labour practice.

Alas, it remains only an example, because Wal-Mart did not threaten to close the store, or anything else for that matter. The company's crime, rather, was that it did not explicitly promise not to close the store. When the subject came up at question and answer sessions with employees, management, on the advice of its lawyers, said nothing. The OLRB, apparently endowed with clairvoyant powers, divined not only that the company intended this as a threat, but that workers in fact saw it as a threat, and not only that, but changed their votes because of it -- not the 43 who, undeterred, voted for the union, but just enough of the 151 who voted against.

The certification process is remarkable enough to begin with: why those employees who wish to bargain collectively should be entitled to force others to join them is an enduring mystery of Canadian labour law, as is the rationale for preventing a company from honestly laying out before its workers the consequences of their choice. But when the case involves not the majority compelling the minority, but the other way around; and when the company is penalized not for what it said, but for what it did not say, something is wrong.

That something is Ontario's labour code. And it is this very undemocratic provision that Gagliano's bill would incorporate into federal law, enabling the Canada Labour Relations Board to order certification of workplaces under its authority "despite a lack of evidence of majority support." But that's just for starters. Among other changes, the bill would also force companies to provide unions with the names and addresses of employees who work at home, who might then have the pleasure of a visit from union recruiters.

This is all the more extraordinary, coupled with the bill's other major provision, which would, in effect, ban federally regulated companies from using replacement workers during a strike. (The legislation says this would apply only where these are used "for the purpose of undermining a trade union's representational capacity," but you can guess how that would be interpreted.) Canadian workers have long had the legal right to withdraw their labour; under the new act, they would have the right to withdraw other people's labour as well.

The justification offered for this repressive measure has always been "to prevent picket-line violence," which is to say to reward it, putting the law in the service of hooliganism. Yet the same people who cannot be counted upon to put away the baseball bats when dealing with dissenters during a strike will now be handed a rolodex with which to pursue reluctant recruits during an organizing drive.

That's if the bill becomes law before the weekend. I would be the last to suggest the Senators should defeat a bill passed by a democratically elected Commons. Still, I worry about the punishing pace they are enduring. Aren't there labour laws to cover this sort of thing?