Jinny Sims

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 24th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, l want to tell my honoured colleague how much I appreciated his passion, especially at this time of the morning. He has probably been up for about 23 hours and he still has that passion because it comes from his deep belief system.

What action does he think the government needs to take to put an end to the fiasco that is happening this morning?

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 24th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my dear friend over there for that wonderful question. I really do want to thank him.

The member knows my history and has heard me speak many times before. When an NDP government legislated, I stood out there and spoke. I was on television and radio, and I went out publicly and I spoke out because it was the wrong thing to do then, and as far as I am concerned workers need to be allowed to work out negotiations between the two parties. I believe in that today as well, and that is what I am sticking up for.

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 24th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I have heard a lot about letters arriving by pigeon or somehow. I have also heard about people getting emails and tweets and Facebook messages. I have actually been receiving emails as well.

I have been receiving emails from postal workers who are asking me to speak up for them. They want me to be their voice, and to not let the government do this while I remain silent. They are counting on me.

All of us are getting emails very similar to that. I will say that when I hear people talking about the inconvenience, asking why we are here, it actually saddens me.

Standing up for rights, whether it is for ourselves or others, is an absolute honour and privilege. As an NDPer, I feel absolutely privileged to have the opportunity to speak up for the rights of workers who are being legislated back to work by government legislation that absolutely disrespects collective bargaining and disrespects even the deal offered by the employer. The government has gone in and been intrusive in a way that is way beyond what is acceptable in a free and democratic society.

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 24th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I really glad that my Liberal colleagues agree with everything the NDP is saying.

However, I do want to say that it has been a Liberal-Conservative coalition in B.C. that has time and time again gone in and stripped collective agreements and forced workers back to work with back-to-work legislation.

We are here today, and I can tell members that I am not wasting my time. I am here today even though it is my 40th wedding anniversary and my husband's 60th birthday, because I absolutely believe that the rights of all working people, and not just unionized working people, have to be defended.

We are going to continue to speak and advocate for as long as we have breath. We will continue to do so. This is not an inconvenience. This is a necessity, folks.

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 24th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I will say this. I live in Newton—North Delta and if these jobs exist, I wish many of them were in Newton—North Delta. I have talked to many of my other colleagues from around the country, and they do not find them there either.

I have told the House stories of women and men in my riding working two full-time jobs, eight hour shifts, and working at $9 to $12 an hour. That is the kind of jobs they are working at.

Nobody has denied that this strike led to a lockout. Nobody has denied that it was a rotating strike that led to a lockout.

The lockout is about reducing wages for people who are working, for current jobs. No matter how often we are told that the job market has grown in Canada, I want to know where those jobs are.

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 24th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I am looking at the clock, and I do not know whether to say it is 7:25 in the morning, which it would be if I were in England right now, or 11:25, which it would be if I were in B.C. Whichever it is, at this time I want to wish all my colleagues in the House a Bonne Fête nationale.

As we debate this very important issue, I want to take a minute to recap. What is it that we are talking about here today? We are talking about a crown corporation, not some entity that is off on another planet, but a crown corporation of a Canadian government, a crown corporation that makes a profit each year and last year made a very hefty profit of hundreds of millions of dollars that went back to support Canadians in other work. That is okay.

This same crown corporation went into negotiations with its employees as if it was taking a loss. That is what I find hard to understand. That company is making a profit and doing very well, but for the very people who help make that profit, who work 24-7 in shift work, who have given years of service, and who deliver mail to some of the remotest communities and keep our businesses going, what the corporation says when the parties get to the table is, “By the way, we are going to pay new people who start to work here 18% less”. Is that the respect we have for the next generation?

Are we saying to the next generation of workers that they are not going to get jobs with decent pay, that they are going to have to make do with a lot less, that they are not going to be able to afford to own a house, and that they are not going to be able to afford a decent living?

At the same time, that corporation turns to its workers and makes a direct attack on something that is dear to every Canadian: their old age security. It goes after their pensions, and not only theirs, but those of the next generation coming in.

When I was growing up, and I have been growing up for a long time and I'm still waiting to grow up, what I used to hear all the time was that with each generation things get better. That is what our parents worked very hard for. My parents immigrated to the U.K. They arrived there with a very young family. My father worked two or three jobs in order to give us an education and the kind of life that he thought would be better than the life he had had. He belonged to unions, absolutely, and instilled in us the importance of the collective: that when workers stick together, they make gains not only for themselves individually, but they make gains for everybody in society.

He also told me something else. He told me that things were going to get better for me and my children. I have a 13-year-old, although maybe she is a bit older than 13 now. By the way, if I was not here, I would be celebrating my 40th wedding anniversary this weekend. As it is, I could well be celebrating it with everyone here. As I look at my children and a lot of my colleagues in the House, and think of the hundreds and thousands of children I have taught over the years, it saddens me that things are actually getting worse for our youth. It saddens me that in this House the government is choosing to make things worse for our youth by reducing the starting wage, a differentiated wage. Those wages should be going up.

Hon. members have heard about the cost of housing in B.C. from my other colleagues. In the area where I live, the cost of housing is very high. As I went door to door, I met family after family, and these are the things I heard them say. They did not want a Rolls Royce, by the way. They did not ask for limousines. They were not asking for transnational holidays or even going overseas to sit by the beach and read a book. They were asking for decent paying jobs so they could go to work, come home, spend time with their families, support their kids through university and college and, at the same time, help to look after their parents. That is what the average Canadian told me as I went from door to door.

However, they also told me what their day-to-day lives were like. Many of them, by the way, used to have what many people call well-paying union jobs in the health care sector in B.C., but we have had a coalition government in B.C. Some members may know that coalition, because it is made up of Conservatives, Liberals and Social Credit Party members. They call themselves Liberals, but we know who they are, because they also went after working people and stripped their collective agreement and fired thousands and thousands of workers.

Later on, the Supreme Court found that to have been incorrect. It found it to be the wrong thing for the government to have done. Those workers, who used to make a decent wage, now have to work two full-time shifts doing exactly the same work. They get paid $9 to $12 an hour for something they used to get paid $18 to $20 an hour to do.

I heard stories of mothers, fathers and grandmothers who are working these two full-time jobs. They said, “We are getting sick to death of politicians telling us how important family is, because we do not have time to spend with our children”. Is that the way we want all working people in Canada to go? We want to have a race to the bottom, to reduce their hourly wages so they have to work two or three jobs. I really want to believe that not a single parliamentarian would want to do that.

I make a very handsome salary right now and would find it very hard to sit in this House and suggest that others can make do on $18 or less per hour. We are not talking about minimum wage any more, but we all need to talk about a living wage, because we know what the cost of living is like. Those are the kinds of things we need to talk about.

Let me get back to my narrative about this corporation, if my colleagues across the room would just give me a little of their attention. A corporation making a huge profit asked its employees for clawbacks of their rights, salary and old age security. Then in its wisdom, it put forward a salary increase as well. Then, out of the blue, which is the part I find hard to explain to my grandchildren, the government stepped in. It first needed a reason to step in, so Canada Post locked the door on its employees, knowing full well there was a government waiting to step in with legislation. Not only did the government step in with legislation, but it also now says that an arbitrator is going to come in and there will be a final offer. However, even that is not enough for the government.

What Canada Post employees have now been offered is a lower hourly wage increase than they had been offered by Canada Post. How can the government be wanting to move things toward a resolution?

Though it was not supported by the 4.5 million Canadians who voted for this side of the House, this is a government that wants to use its majority to smack working people on the head by saying, yes, the corporation is making a profit and, yes, we benefit from that as Canadians but, no, the workers have to pay the price because we need to extract more profits.

I just do not see how that is the right or fair thing to do. I also wonder what productivity is going to be like in that corporation when there is a settlement.

There is one truth, by the way, that I have learned in my lifetime, that whenever there is strike between labour and management, there is going to be a settlement at some time. There will be a settlement.

When a settlement is imposed externally by legislation, I can say from personal experience that the impact on the workers and on productivity is huge.

I am a teacher. I also come from B.C. I am used to being legislated by government, not once, but twice by a coalition Liberal-Conservative government. I know the impact it had on teachers in that province, what it did to morale, what it did to people who were not able to teach and the impact it had on students' learning.

This week a report was released that said a very high percentage of Canadian workers are depressed at their workplace. If the Conservative government believes it has found an antidote to depression, this legislation is not it. I would really urge the government to go and have another consultation to see what that would look like.

Once again, if we want to have employees who are productive, happy at their work and who will give their all, let them negotiate their own collective agreements. By imposing a collective agreement on this group of employees, what the government is doing is taking away one of their fundamental rights, their right to negotiate their own labour.

Surely that is not too much to ask for. It is not too late for the government to see daylight, which will soon be upon us. It is not too late for it to say to Canada Post, “Take off the lock. Let the workers go back to work”. They have agreed and will work under the contract. Furthermore, “Go back to the negotiating table. If need be, call in a mediator”. Let the two sides negotiate an agreement.

That is all it would take from the government, which would send a huge signal to working people in this country that they actually had a government that respected working people and a government that believed in free collective bargaining.

We hear a lot from the government about the free market. Let us use those same principles in this bargain. Let the bargain take place without any government interference.

I will tell a small story about a young man I used to teach. He would come into my class. He had a family background that was very heavily into business in the north end of Nanaimo. His parents were very business-centred and had no time for unions and said “You are going to be teaching this unit about unions to our kids, and we really do not want our son to learn anything about the union movement because he is not going to be a worker. He is going to move into the business world”. I discussed this with them and said if that were so, their son had nothing to lose by learning about the union movement.

I spent about three months going over the industrial revolution and the reasons the unions were formed. I mentioned that it was to make a level playing field, so that employers would not abuse employees and people would not get killed on the job, or work 20 hours a day, and so that kids would not be sent into the mines. It was for all of those reasons.

When we had finished that unit, the parents came to the school. They came into my classroom and said they wanted to thank me. I asked what I had done, and they said they wanted to thank me because their son came home and they had a conversation about how to grow their business and what they had to do and how they had to look after the needs of working people as well, the people they employed.

That young man went on to manage his family business and I am still in touch with him and he still tells me that it was an amazing unit that he did.

I wish my colleagues across the room would also realize that we do not have to demonize unions. What we need to do is to celebrate people who work collectively, people who realize that to build a strong Canada, to build our health care system and our education system and to have decent pensions, we must stand as a collective.

Whether we are unionized or not, this is about the rights of working people to earn a decent wage. This is about average Canadians and their right to live in Canada in a way they can support their families and not have to go to food banks. This is about our youth having a future that will be a little rosier than it looks right now. If not for ourselves, let us please think of our children and grandchildren.

I ran in this election because I wanted to help build a better Canada than we have today, where health care is stronger, education is stronger and old age security is stronger.

I read a book a long time ago that said this: “One judges a society by how well it looks after its young, its old, its sick, its disadvantaged”.

Colleagues, I would say that the CUPW discussions are about exactly that. As Canadians and parliamentarians, we cannot fail our children, our grandchildren and our working people, so I ask everyone to stand with us.

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 23rd, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I will answer it if the hon. member will let me. That is what I am trying to do. Nobody has ever accused me of evading a question.

When a government supports a crown corporation's lockout of its employees, those employees have very few options left to them. What they are doing right now is trying to draw attention to what is going on. They are trying to get some action.

I am perfectly prepared to go back into my riding and explain to my constituents what the issues are about. They are working people. People come to this country and work hard at two or three jobs. They are the ones who are telling me, “Do not let them take away our pensions. Do not let them take away our decent paying jobs”.

I know they are being inconvenienced, but when it comes to rights, it is not about what is important for me, it is what is important for each and every one of us. This is their new home. This is why—

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 23rd, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague across the aisle for his wonderful question. Let us remember—

[Air India, June 22nd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, June 23 is a painfully sad day for thousands of Canadian families.

Twenty-six years ago, 329 people lost their lives in a tragedy known as the Air India bombing, the largest mass murder in Canadian history. Although a Canadian inquiry was launched and completed, many questions remain unanswered. Relatives still struggle to understand how it happened.

Today our hearts go out to each and every one of them. On the anniversary of this atrocity, I stand here asking all parties in the House to join together in remembrance of the victims and their families.

Canadian, British and Indian citizens perished on that flight, but countries all over the world mourn them today.

[Citizenship and Immigration, June 21st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the government's lack of transparency around visitor visas is causing heartache for families right across Canada at times of weddings and funerals.

One in five will be denied a visa this year. For Newton—North Delta, the percentage is much higher. Visitors have no idea why they are rejected or what they can do to qualify. People are frustrated and they want answers.

Will the government implement a transparent and open appeal process for visas?