that 9 of 10 Canadians believed that the store closure was mainly due to the unionization. A local newspaper columnist accused the UFCW leaders in Washington, D.C., of using the Jonquière store workers (in a city with chronically high unemployment, and whose stores had been wiped out by the opening of the Place du Royaume shopping mall in Chicoutimi) as "cannon fodder" to provoke a fight in order to incite public opinion against the Walmart, knowing that Walmart headquarters would not tolerate a unionized store. In September 2005, the Quebec Labour Board ruled that the closing of a Walmart store amounted to a reprisal against unionized workers and has ordered additional hearings on possible compensation for the employees, though it offered no details. Union organizers suggested that Walmart was making an example of the Jonquière store to pressure workers at other locations not to unionize. At the Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec Walmart, the 200 employees had organized successfully in January 2005 but contract negotiations stalled and an arbitrator was called in, finally reaching a two-year deal on April 9, 2009. However the Saint-Hyacinthe contract was seen largely as a Pyrrhic victory for the UFCW, as the arbitrator portrayed "Walmart as at least as good an employer-even a superior employer- compared with other retailers", noting that Walmart workers were paid more than their counterparts at Zellers. The union's calls for wage and benefit increases were all rejected, particularly their demand for an automatic-progression annual wage scales, as that would have conflicted with the company-wide annual performance evaluation, a key component of Walmart's business model. The arbitrator awarded existing workers (but not new hires) a small wage gain of 30¢ an hour to prevent them from being "impoverished" by dues paid to a union that failed to justify wages increases to the arbitrator. In 2011, the Saint-Hyacinthe Walmart employees voted (147 out of 250) to decertify United Food and Commercial Workers as their representative union; it has been suggested that employees were disappointed in their union whose 2009 contract was tilted strongly in favour of their employer. Walmart employees in Gatineau, Quebec joined the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) in 2008. This was followed by two years of stalled negotiations before an arbitrator imposed a collective agreement. In November 2011, after one year with their first collective agreement, the 150 Wal-Mart employees voted to decertify. On August 15, 2013, the Supreme Court