Mr. Speaker, we know that we currently bear a heavy responsibility, but it is because the Bloc Quebecois takes its role as the official opposition very seriously that it cannot support a special piece of legislation that denies both the right to strike and the right to negotiate. On Monday, we proposed amendments that would have allowed the employees to go back to work without undermining the ability to negotiate for those who exercised their right under the Canada Labour Code.
Why must this special bill single out the workers and some of the strikers? Why must it undermine negotiated settlements by outlining a general and drastic worsening of working conditions? Why is the government itself not acting on the substance of the report by Commissioner Hope, who was appointed to advise the government and did so by working hard and producing a comprehensive report? Why did the government actually undermine the significance of the Hope report? Why is it satisfied with a hollowed-out Hope report?
The Minister of Labour's position is certainly not impartial and I will show that. Is the minister acting like a sorcerer's apprentice because of inexperience, ignorance or bad faith? Let us at least put the question.
The government is in a hurry, but it has difficulty hiding the fact that it is taking advantage of a serious situation to protect interests which are not the economic interests it is referring to. The government does not care about establishing conditions which would promote co-operation. It imposes a bludgeon law which does not even leave room for mutually agreed settlements. The government also treats differently the three companies, at the expense of the workers affected by the strike and the lockout.
The proposal which we made on Monday seeks to preserve the future: everyone goes back to work; mediation takes place according to the Hope formula; a public report is released and recommendations are made to this House to try to restore a balance which was destroyed for workers by the action and inaction of this government.
Since the strike started, its settlement has become a national issue. We feel that, in the context, the two sides may have a new desire to reach a settlement. Such an example of conditions promoting fair and healthy work relations would be a definite asset for the future of the country that this government claims to want to build. However, in the meantime, what Canadians and Quebecers see, is a government taking advantage of a serious
situation to promote its partisan interests. That is not from me: it is from the Hope report.
We had to protect the interests of Canadian workers who used their right to strike, as provided in the Labour Code. I said it on several occasions:
If the Canadian economy cannot afford the Canada Labour Code then it should be said and something should be done in order to avoid the sort of mess we are in. The workers will be the ones who will pay and we know many persons who are not responsible for that. The government and the House cannot have blind eyes on that.
The right to strike is a fundamental right in every democratic society. In the context of labour relations, it plays a major role in bringing about a settlement between the parties, a mutually satisfactory settlement through which the level of productivity sought by companies and workers, and society as a whole, can be achieved.
Never has forced settlement brought about innovative ideas to deal with new situations. Solutions imposed on the parties only repeat patterns that cannot be adapted any more to particular situations. But there are no short cuts when it comes to looking for solutions together. Every time we failed to do so-and, as we know, this has been a problem in the public service-we ended up paying a much higher price in terms of loss of productivity, because it becomes impossible under such circumstances to finds mutually acceptable solutions.
This is not an attack on companies, on the contrary. But businesses worthy of the trust the public puts in them must know that they cannot claim to be reorganizing in order to compete if they do not take their employees into account. There are no short cuts.
It is extremely unfortunate that the new so-called "labour" minister's second move since taking office is to undermine any chance of real corporate reorganization by putting in place mechanisms, traditional mechanisms, that have already proven ineffective in reforming the system. With these mechanisms, the minister condemns Canada to live through situations we had hoped never to live through again.
I am telling you this as a Bloc member, because we take our role of official opposition seriously. After all, we could rejoice over the fact that a position perpetuating problems and making them worse can be put in place this way. But no, we are here to play a positive role as long as we remain in this country and look after the interests of the workers as well as the companies who depend on a satisfactory settlement.
The Hope report contains a wealth of information. I will try to give you a brief outline of the highlights that should have guided the government in preparing its bill, if it had really sought what it claims to be seeking. First of all, I will outline the main elements of the Hope report. The report says this: "In summary, the dispute revolves around extremely complex collective bargaining issues raised under circumstances that do not lend themselves very well to negotiated solutions. Given the circumstances, the purpose of this report is to determine the possibility of initiating an ongoing process that would allow the parties to deal with these very complex issues through binding mediation or arbitration maximizing the parties' involvement in setting the conditions".
Mr. Hope took on the difficult task of defining the conditions in which solutions can be found despite the difficult situation. He reviewed the available literature on labour relations and administration, after stressing the labour department's basic tradition of neutrality and objectivity. That is what Mr. Hope himself said. I think he would be disappointed in the current situation. He noted that, according to the unions, the government, through the Minister of Transport, delayed the collective bargaining process, and that both the employers and the government seem ready to attack the rail employees' working conditions.
It says that, in fact, the companies have already made demands of this kind in the past. They have already tried to obtain similar concessions during past rounds of negotiations. Their demands are so controversial and provocative because of the partisan role taken by the government, which supports the position of the railway companies, and because of the tenacity with which the companies have stuck to these demands. And, he says, their points of disagreement are complicated because we are now in a period of economic recovery and in a situation which management, the management of companies, has let fester for several years.
Having said this, what did Mr. Hope propose in his report after reviewing the situation? He said that we could have let the strike go on. Because we find ourselves before two reconcilable parties. The minister says that there have been hours and hours and hours of negotiation, but what she really means is that people have been sitting at the same table for hours and hours and hours. Anyone who has ever been involved in negotiations knows that people can sit down face to face, side by side, yet negotiate nothing, put nothing on the table, because the parties refuse to put anything on the table as long as they are uncertain whether they will come out winners when they play their cards.
It is true that the government has intervened so many times in the railway industry that the employers, and in some cases the unions, are just waiting for the government to step in. This undermines the effectiveness of a strike.
By the way, the Hope report says that a strike cannot be stopped just because of interruptions in service; the right to strike can only be suspended in extremely serious cases. The report states that the worst case scenario for the unions would be if the government found itself forced to impose the railway companies' demands as a prelude to the rationalization process outlined in the reports.
We now find ourselves in this worst case scenario. Why? Once the government decided to intervene, instead of following the recommendations contained in the Hope report, it decided to use a process which has already proven unsuccessful. In fact, what does the Hope report have to say about the government legislating employees back to work? The report indicates that dispute arbitration must be avoided at all cost, because such arbitration cases have prevented us from addressing the problem and often led us to copy old systems instead of looking for new solutions and making progress.
Under what conditions could we allow the parties to break the current deadlock without a strike? We agree that the only means of settling the real issues is the right to strike.
Mr. Hope arrives at the following solution-he says there could be other ones, but this is the one he proposes: first, a mediation-arbitration stage to allow the parties involved to reach a consensus on what he calls the parameters but that I would describe as the overall situation of the companies.
Let me explain. Workers are convinced that the companies make profits, but that they are mismanaged which results in waste, that Paul Tellier's salary does not allow him to teach lessons to others, that the government's plan-they hear about it-to streamline operations is a threat to them, that the Minister of Transport supports the companies and that he made offending comments, to say the least, when he said that railway employees with a grade eight or nine education should not be blamed for negotiating overgenerous collective agreements.
