Daniel Blaikie

[Air Canada Public Participation Act, April 20th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, the duplicity of the Liberals on this issue has been appalling, frankly.

They were duplicitous on the substance when the Prime Minister, the member for Winnipeg North, and other members got up and pretended to be the champions of aerospace workers in Winnipeg and across the country. Then, at nearly the first opportunity after forming government, the Liberals introduced legislation that would completely betray those workers and contradicted what the Liberals had been saying in opposition. That duplicity was shameful.

Now the Liberals are showing the same appalling duplicity on the process. The member for Winnipeg North, for instance, had some great things to say about time allocation in the last Parliament. I would like to share them with the hon. Minister of Transport. He said:

The government, by once again relying on a time allocation motion to get its agenda passed, speaks of incompetence. It speaks of a genuine lack of respect for parliamentary procedure and ultimately for Canadians. It continues to try to prevent members of Parliament from being engaged and representing their constituents on the floor of the House of Commons.

Does the Minister of Transport agree with the then member of Winnipeg North, who apparently is not the same member—

[The Senate, April 20th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, this week we are hearing of senators who are using their parliamentary staff to work in their private tanning facilities. We are hearing that they are using them to organize their home renovations.

The Liberals congratulate themselves a lot in this House for talk about openness and transparency. However, we have recommended concrete action. We have talked about tightening the expense limits in the Senate, limiting taxpayer-funded travel, and strengthening the Senate ethics office. What we are asking for the government to do today is to stand in the House and join us in demanding the implementation of those rules by the Senate. Will it do it?

[Business of Supply, April 19th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his question.

I agree with the principle that we should support political parties with public funds up to a certain point. However, we should not use that argument to excuse actions that are inexcusable.

Accordingly, we should indeed reopen the debate on funding from the public purse, but that does not excuse what the Minister of Justice did.

[Business of Supply, April 19th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for the question and the well-made point within the question. I would agree with him on the summoning of the kind of indignation we have seen from the government benches on this issue when the facts are quite clear. We are not here to say that what is being done is illegal. That is a red herring according to the very criteria that the Prime Minister set out not more than six months ago. At issue is not whether the law was broken, but whether this is conduct becoming of a minister under the code of conduct implemented by the new Prime Minister.

Unless the member for Vancouver Granville was wrapped in an insulating blanket of self-righteousness, she could not be blind to the fact that this does not meet that bar. There is clearly something getting in the way of Liberal members having an heretical appreciation of the facts. I do not know what that is, whether it is rose-coloured glasses, that blanket of self-righteousness, or what, but this merits an apology. It merits giving the money back, and then it merits moving on and getting down to knowing how to behave.

[Business of Supply, April 19th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, just to set the context, and I doubt I am the first to read them into the record today, but I think it is worth quoting the ethics principles that the ministers were given:

There should be no preferential access to government, or appearance of preferential access, accorded to individuals or organizations because they have made financial contributions to politicians and political parties.

I share the view expressed by many members here today on both sides of the House that these are not the kinds of things I came here to talk about. There are a lot more important issues that we should be addressing.

However, that cannot be used as an excuse. I would say that is an argument for ministers not to engage in this kind of activity, so we do not have to spend time talking about it. However, as long as there is going to be that kind of activity, we have to talk about it.

It is not opposition members who should be blamed for having brought this issue forward. If the government earnestly wants to spend our time talking about the other issues, and I would agree with the government that we should be talking about an expansion of the Canada pension plan, instituting a national pharmacare program, and rolling out child care across the country, that is what I would like to be talking about. However, as long as the government is going to engage in the kinds of activities that brought about this debate, then we are not going to be able to do that.

These things have to be addressed and not cynically used as a smokescreen to try to get the government out of trouble when its ministers are behaving in ways that are obviously inappropriate. They are not illegal. We are not here to say that this is an illegal activity, but they are inappropriate activities and we do hold ministers in this country to a higher code of conduct. That makes sense. That is what Canadians expect. It is certainly what I expect.

We have seen this with other governments; we saw it under the previous government, and we saw it under governments previous to that government, this tendency to insist on the narrow, legal definitions of conduct for ministers and not accept that there is a higher code of conduct and that ministers not only have to be following the law, and not only following principles of ethics, but they have to be seen to be following those principles, or there is a problem.

Traditionally, ministers would step aside if there was a problem while it was investigated. Those ministers would come back later if they were cleared, and not if they were not.

This tendency, which I find quite unfortunate, to bear down and say that if it cannot be proven in a court of law, then too bad, they are going to carry on as if it does not matter, is not acceptable. It flies in the face of the code of conduct that the Prime Minister himself brought in.

It was not eons ago, 100 or 150 years ago, that some former prime minister brought this in. This is something that the new Prime Minister himself, just months ago, brought in. He said it was important that his ministers be held to this higher standard. It is not something that the opposition is suddenly making up. It is not something that the Prime Minister just brought in willy-nilly either. We hear it every day, ad nauseam, frankly, when ministers get up to talk about transparency, openness, accountability, and how they are setting a new bar.

What has happened here, a private fundraiser for lawyers to meet the justice minister and to advertise access to the justice minister, is not anywhere near consistent with setting a new bar. It is pretty low, and people have a right to be concerned. They have a right to be concerned not just because this is selling access to a minister of the crown, but also because it is doing that within her area of responsibility, which is quite significant. This is a person who appoints judges for Canada.

It is a fundraiser of potential candidates, or we do not know exactly but certainly people who practise law are potential candidates for appointment to the bench. They bought a $500 ticket to an event to meet the person who could be the gateway to the next promotion in their career. One does not have to be a lawyer or a professor of ethics to understand what is wrong with that. I do not think one does.

I was sympathetic early on. There were accusations levelled pretty early on about the justice minister. Another member alluded to that earlier, having to do with her husband. Privately, I kind of felt that one cannot put one's spouse in a blind trust. I understood that and there had not been any evidence that she was going to demonstrate poor judgment, so let us wait and see.

We did not have to wait very long to show that this minister is capable of great lapses in ethical judgment, because this is not defensible. Then she tried to say it was not really in her capacity as minister that they wanted to meet with her, that a whole bunch of high-priced lawyers in Toronto just wanted to meet with her because she is an MP from Vancouver. Come on.

I appreciate that government members want to defer to the ethical lapses of the previous government. There is a lot of material to mine there. I can appreciate that the Liberals want to bring those things up. They want to bring them up because, in part, it was those arguments and actions by the previous government that created the impetus for change. It is a double-edged sword for the Liberals to remind Canadians of just how angry they were with the ethical lapses of the previous government when their Minister of Justice is involved in the very kinds of activity that we are here to talk about today.

Part of the issue is about trust. When we hear the kind of defence that the Minister of Justice is putting forward about her actions and it does not pass the smell test, that hurts trust in government. It speaks to questions of openness and transparency.

Just before the member previous got up to speak, the government came into the House. Again, if the Liberals want to distinguish themselves from the previous government, what should they do? There is a serious debate before the House about the jobs of Canadian aerospace workers, and we just witnessed the government House leader come into this House and serve notice of a motion to invoke closure. Of all the cynical and worst tools of a majority government to ram its agenda through, closure is the worst. The previous government took that tool and reformed it, and brought it to new heights, I would say.

Again, consistent with this criticism of the previous government, we were told we were going to have a new government. It was going to take the role of Parliament differently. It was going to treat Parliament differently. The ministers were going to be held to a higher ethical standard. We see this on the legislative end. They hardly have a bill before Parliament. They have had several routine bills on the estimates. They have two bills that are mandated by the Supreme Court with a deadline before summer. They have a few bills that will simply repeal some acts of the previous government.

They hardly have a bill of their own that they wrote themselves. We have had two days of debate on that bill, and they are already invoking closure. It is unconscionable, when we have such a sparse legislative agenda, that they would be using closure. Then they want to say to just trust them on the other stuff and not talk about their conduct outside of the House, that it is a trustworthy government. However, when we want to have a discussion—or not, as closure would seem to imply—about the 2,600 families, with members who are working for Air Canada, the Liberals are going to shut that down. That is what the Liberals are doing, and that is what we are seeing from the government today.

The Liberals want to show us that they are to be trusted and that we do not have to have these kinds of debates to hold them to account. However, I submit that as time goes on, their methods are beginning to look a lot like those of the previous government. Where the previous government, to its small credit, had a similar fundraising scandal with a member of Parliament from my hometown, the former MP for Saint Boniface, she at least paid the money back.

I heard the arguments of members across the way on the government side in terms of their disappointment in the ethical conduct of the previous government. However, I would say that the more they make those arguments, the more it raises the question: Why would they not at least do what they did, at the very least? Never mind holding themselves to a higher ethical bar. At the very least, they could hold themselves to the same bar. We are not seeing that. Already the current government is beginning to adopt some of the habits of the previous government, and I find that quite unfortunate.

[Air Canada Public Participation Act, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, we have heard a few tautologies from the government. We have heard that a deal is a deal. The government has invoked that in order to refuse to stand up to Saudi Arabia with respect to its record on human rights and proceed with a contract that would deliver arms to that country. We have also heard that the law is the law is the law. This is a deal in law. It is a deal that was made when Air Canada was privatized. It is a deal that was made with Canadian workers and aerospace workers. We have a deal that is in the law. We know that the law is the law is the law, and that a deal is a deal. Why is it that that is good enough for the government to go ahead and protect the interests of the Saudi government, but it is not good enough to stand up for the sanctity of a deal when it comes to protecting Canadian workers?

[Air Canada Public Participation Act, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am really heartened to hear a concern from a Conservative member about the carbon footprint of Air Canada's operations. I would agree that when it comes to this, given where the jobs are most likely to go, as with a number of issues when it comes to global trade, assessing the carbon footprint of goods and not simply the cost charged to consumers at the counter is very important, indeed.

[Air Canada Public Participation Act, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to note that the reversal of the position by the member for Winnipeg North on this is totally appalling. Many times in the last Parliament, 15 or 20 times, he presented petitions, saying that this was terrible, that we needed to get tough on Air Canada, and that we needed to enforce the act.

As a politician, first at the provincial level and then at the federal level, he spent more than 20 years in opposition. He finally got a chance to do something for those workers whom he stood beside all that time, and he dropped the ball. Not only did he drop the ball, but he has since stood in the House and talked about how we need to be fair to Air Canada and recognize its difficult position. If the very same things had come out of the mouth of a Conservative cabinet minister no more than 12 months ago, he would have been all over the Conservatives in the House.

It is shameful and a testament to the fact that, if the member for Winnipeg North belongs anywhere in the House, it is in opposition.

[Air Canada Public Participation Act, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, that is the question that the government has yet to answer. What is here, really? As he says, we have some nods and we have some winks. This may help out Bombardier, and that would be nice because that seems like a big issue; and it is. It is important to continue to have work at Bombardier.

The proper response by the government would have been to say it needs a strategy for the aerospace industry; that is what it needs to do. I do not know if it was panic or inexperience, or just what it was, but it said, “Here is a one-off deal. We can give something to Air Canada and make Air Canada executives happy. We can create some jobs at Bombardier. Oh yes, western Canada; where is that again?”

We need a national strategy so that we are not doing the same old thing of pitting region against region, but making sure that each region gets its due. There are serious challenges in the aerospace industry today. The way to do it is to come up with a strategy instead of cutting a bunch of one-off deals and finding out later it was the wrong play.

[Air Canada Public Participation Act, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I will start by saying how disappointed I am at having to rise to speak to this bill. This is not the kind of bill that I expected to have to deal with. If I had been told a year ago that the Liberals would be in government and then base a projection about this kind of bill on what they were saying at the time, I never would have thought that I would be speaking to such a bill.

In the last Parliament the now Prime Minister was standing on picket lines with Air Canada workers, shouting about solidarity, and probably taking a few selfies, too. That was great, because he was out shopping for votes. Many workers who felt that the Prime Minister was serious in his expression of solidarity may well have gone out and voted for the Liberals because they never would have suspected a Liberal government to bring forward a bill like this.

Some of the prime minister's members, some of whom have returned, like the member for Winnipeg North, were saying, “The law is clear. The corporation is to maintain operational and overhaul centres in the city of Winnipeg, the Montreal urban community, and the city of Mississauga. That is the law. The Conservative government says it is tough on crime. It is time to get tough on Air Canada”. Those are the kinds of remarks we were hearing at the time from Liberal MPs like the member for Winnipeg North.

Fast forward to today. As I mentioned in debate on a motion earlier, we are six months into the new government. Most of the legislation that has been brought forward is either routine business with respect to the finances of government, bills responding to Supreme Court decisions, usually with a court-imposed timeline, or they are straight up and down repeal of certain measures brought in by the previous Conservative government that were explicit election commitments by the Liberals.

If we want to look for a bill that does not involve any of that, that goes beyond those things, then really the only indication of what the government is going to be like for the next four years on issues that were not foreseen in the election is this bill. I have to say that this bill is a complete betrayal of the workers that the Liberals pretended to be the champions of when they stood beside them on the picket line. It is absolutely shameful. It is a sign of the kind of cynicism and condescension the Prime Minister must feel toward Canadian workers. How could he stand on a picket line with them and say that he is going to protect their jobs, to shame the government of the day for not enforcing an act that in the end it was his intention to change when he came into government? That is a rhetorical sleight of hand the likes of which even the previous government was not capable of doing. During the campaign the Liberals were righteous in saying “Oh, the government should enforce the act. We will enforce the act.” Yes, they will, right after they change it to get rid of the very provisions that would protect the jobs and the very reason for which the workers would like to see it enforced.

I am appalled, frankly, but maybe having spent as much time around politics as I have I should not be surprised, particularly not by Liberals. We are six months in and they have already managed to teach me a new depth of cynicism when it comes to politics.

If it is a contest of narratives as politics so often is, the Liberals would have us believe there is a happy coincidence of factors, that it just so happened that without any prodding or conversation between the government and Air Canada, Air Canada decided to buy some Bombardier C Series jets, and it just so happened to be at a time when Bombardier was in trouble. Some other hon. members have done a good job of poking and prodding at this issue to get the government to affirm that there is a connection between those things, but if we listen to the government members' answers, they say, “No, no, no. There is no connection. It is just a happy coincidence. Bombardier was in trouble and Air Canada came forward.” It just so happened that when Air Canada came forward and there were some rumblings about the federal government selling out Canadian workers that the provinces just happily decided to drop their lawsuits.

As a result of all of these things magically coming together by some unseen force, the government feels this is a great time to change the act because we need to be fair to Air Canada, the very same Air Canada that the Liberals not that long ago when they were in opposition thought it was time to get tough on.

That is the story.

The Liberals have said that a whole bunch of benefits are going to accrue from this bill. It just so happens that none of them are in the bill. The centres of excellence are not in the bill.

There are no legal guarantees for those jobs. There are for the ones that are getting gutted. However, for the new jobs that we are supposed to get in this great trade, there are no legal protections for those jobs and there is no guarantee that Air Canada would not turn around, walk away, and put those jobs somewhere else.

Under the terms of this bill, by far the most contentious clause is not the clause that says instead of having the jobs in Winnipeg, Mississauga, and Montreal we would have them in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. It is the one right under it that says Air Canada would define for itself the type of work that would be done and the type of work that would satisfy the requirements of the act. It is the clause that says it would determine the volume of work and the level of employment. Air Canada could rent a closet in Winnipeg, put some engine parts in it, and pay a guy to come around once a year to check up on them, make sure they are still there, maybe dust them, and that would be sufficient to meet the requirements of the bill.

The Liberals cannot tell me that we are supposed to be happy with that situation and accept a bunch of jobs that have no guarantees at all, particularly with the language of the company, and the government, incidentally. Next time there is a spot for a Liberal speaker on this bill, I wonder if they should not just invite the Air Canada corporate executives in and hear from them directly and cut out the middle man. They are expensive middle men for Air Canada in this debate. We do not need them.

We have heard these kinds of arguments before when we have heard about flexibility and the need to compete. I am sensitive to some of that, but one wonders, there is a tension here. That is, are we saying that we have come to the point where we cannot do maintenance on planes in Canada and have a competitive company? Is that what we are prepared to say? Is the Liberal government encouraging Canadians to believe that the global economy has come to a point that we cannot do maintenance on planes in Canada, that they have to be shipped somewhere else in order for companies to be competitive?

One wonders why one should be so concerned about the viability of a company once it does not mean any direct employment in Canada anymore. We are giving up guarantees for these jobs because we need to be flexible and competitive. That language means moving the jobs out of Canada. The government cannot have its cake and eat it to. It cannot say this is all about creating jobs when all of the jobs it is talking about, frankly, are completely consistent with the act as it is. There is zero reason in order to establish those centres of excellence to change the act. If this is not about exporting jobs, if this is not about sending jobs to Mexico or elsewhere, then why the changes to the act? It does not make sense.

On the face of it, this is about taking good-paying Canadian jobs and moving them out of Canada. The rest of it, the window dressing, none of which is in the act, and none of which is legally enforceable, is all about giving a fig leaf to cover the government in this, and it needs a big one because there is a lot that is ugly to cover.

There is nothing to say that a month later Air Canada would not take those jobs away. I am not saying it will. Maybe it will be three, four, or five years, but there is nothing to prevent those jobs from being taken away. The Liberals knew that well when they were opposition. That is why the Liberals said that the Conservative government should enforce the act. The Liberals must realize that now there will not even be an act to enforce, not in any meaningful sense, because under the bill Air Canada will be given every right to define the scope of this work right out of Canada.

The Liberal narrative on this is so contorted it is just shocking. I hope Canadians will listen to this debate. They do not have to listen to a lot of it to understand what is really going on. I hope they are paying attention, because what is going on here is completely unacceptable.