Peggy Nash

[Railway Continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, there has been a trend over the last 25 years to 30 years toward the stagnation of the wages of working people. That is one reason why I introduced my minimum wage bill because the minimum wage has been eroded over the last 30 years.

In North America, especially, there has been a strong undermining of the rights of working people and we see it south of the border. But increasingly here in Canada there is a growing gap between those, like Hunter Harrison, the CEO of CN, who make $56 million a year and the people who work at CN.

Increasingly, the average working people are finding that costs are going up much faster than their incomes and people are eroding their standard of living, and worse than that their rights are being eroded. People become afraid to speak up. If they see a safety problem at work, they are afraid to speak up. If they see some other kind of problem, something that is not right in the workplace, they are afraid to speak up. There is a real overall danger in our society. We undermine democratic structures like the right of working people to have a voice in the workplace.

We can go to countries like China where we never have to worry about workers having a voice or we never have to worry about the environment, human rights or any of those other pesky things that get in the way of a fast moving economy, but we do so at great degradation, not only to the air we breath and the water we drink but to the quality of life and the decent functioning of a civil society.

[Railway Continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I cannot speculate as to why the government felt it was necessary to bring in such heavy handed legislation to force closure on the negotiations. I cannot speculate except that perhaps the government does not fully appreciate the impact of the rights that it erodes when it takes this kind of action.

On the second question, when CN Rail was deregulated and privatized, we were assured that safety would be a number one priority. We were assured that service would be top notch. We were assured that we would not notice any difference except that it would be better.

Now we have a CEO who makes $56 million a year. We have a service that seems a little frayed at the edges. This has not been in the best interests of Canadians. If rail is such an important artery to our economy, then perhaps this was not the best course of action we took back in the 1990s.

[Railway Continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would like my colleagues in the House to imagine that they use a wheelchair. They have rights under our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They have the right to be treated equally and to be given fair accommodation even though they use a wheelchair and have a disability.

I would like them to imagine that they are going to a concert and when they get there, the organizer says he knows they have rights, but because the elevator was not running properly it was shut down so their right would not be available. They have to go home. I would like them to imagine their right to be treated fairly. I would like them to imagine that right being taken away.

That is happening here. People who have fought for the right to have a voice in the workplace, and to raise the concerns that they may have lived with day in and day out over months and years, finally get a chance to bring these to the bargaining table, and the employer decides that it is not going to deal with those issues. The employer is forcing a dispute, locking people out, and relying on the government to side with it and force them back to work. That is happening here.

Members would feel some resentment. It festers in the workplace. It is not conducive to ongoing good labour relations, or harmony in the workplace for anybody who has been involved in any kind of contract negotiation. What they want at the end is for all parties to feel that they did not get everything they wanted, but they received what they needed and that it was a fair process. That is not happening here.

[Railway Continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join with my colleagues this evening in this important debate on this back to work legislation. For those viewers who are watching this debate and who may not fully understand the background, I want to take a minute to go through some of the background. I do understand the perspective of people who see a disruption, whether it is in rail or whatever the industry is, and they say can those people not just go back to work and problem solved.

I want to take a few minutes to talk about the collective bargaining process. I understand the concern about the economy and the need to get our freight moving. We have to understand from the very outset that the collective bargaining process is about two parties. This is a negotiation process whereby two parties try to arrive at an agreement that they will have to live with day in and day out for the term of the agreement.

For the people who work in rail, for the people affected by this collective agreement, they may have concerns that come up from time to time, day in and day out over a period of months and years. The only opportunity they have for their voices to be heard in a democratic fashion is through their elected representatives in the bargaining process. The representatives take their concerns to the bargaining table and in a situation of equals the people who are covered by the collective agreement, labour and management sitting as equals try to resolve their differences through this process.

It is a process that is defined by law. It has been defined over a period of decades, of generations. The rights that are enshrined in the collective bargaining process are rights that people have fought for. They were not just given by a government or by the employer. These were rights that people had to organize and fight for, and sometimes they were terrible fights, in order to achieve that basic opportunity to sit down with elected representatives face to face with the employer, raise the issues of the day and resolve those concerns in a democratic fashion. It is an opportunity for the people covered by the collective agreement to address a range of concerns.

Usually when there is some kind of dispute in bargaining the focus of the media and therefore the public is automatically on wages and they become the central issue. Usually wages are a part of the concern, but not the entire concern. Certainly issues that are negotiated are wages, benefits, working conditions, relationships in the workplace in terms of how disputes will be dealt with, how concerns will be dealt with. As part of the working conditions the most important working conditions are those of the health and the safety of the people who work in a given environment.

My concern always when a government comes in with ham-fisted back to work legislation is that it pushes all of those rights and the democratic process off the table. It is a very ham-fisted, heavy-handed way of resolving what ought to be a very finely negotiated collective agreement that everyone has to live with.

Often when agreements are imposed, whatever the method of the imposition, they are less satisfactory. The issues that remain unresolved fester and they remain concerns, whether they are issues on the side of the employer or on the side of the workers. That is one major concern that I have.

This is not an isolated situation. Over the last number of years the Canadian government has enacted a number of pieces of legislation that chip away at the rights of working people, legislative rights that were designed to protect them and their fundamental rights in the workplace and their democratic right to collective bargaining, and ultimately the right to strike.

I want to take a minute on the right to strike because it is about the issue of power. The employer has a great deal of power in the workplace. Employers decide who to hire, who to fire, who to promote. In addition to that, employers decide what their product or service will be, how they will manage that product or service, what equipment they will invest in, what kind of advertising they will do or what kind of clients will buy their products. They decide the advertising and how they are going to market their services. They have a great deal of power over what it is they are producing in the marketplace, and that is certainly well known. That is the system that we have.

For people who work for the employer, as I said earlier, the only opportunities they have to give their input and to exercise any kind of rights in the workplace is not as an individual person but through the collective, through their collective agreement.

Organizing that process, being part of collective bargaining, is something for which people have fought for years. Chipping away at these rights, as we have in Canada, has led us to the point where Canada now has one of the worst records when it comes to labour rights in the western world. This it is very troubling and it is something about which all Canadians ought to be concerned.

Some may say unions are a problem, they are too much trouble, they are always after something, Whether it is labour rights, or other legal rights or human rights based on religion, ethnicity, gender or disability rights, the other person's rights may not seem quite as urgent as one's own rights, but when directly affected, one understands how important they are. I think fair-minded people everywhere in the country ought to be concerned that if labour rights are being eroded, as they are, what other rights are being eroded in Canada?

We had a discussion earlier today with questions about the cancellation of the court challenges program by the government, thereby undermining the ability of Canadians, usually the most disadvantaged Canadians, to access their basic rights under the Charter of Rights.

Those who quickly dismiss labour rights ought to understand that this is only one aspect of a broader tapestry of rights that we pride ourselves on in Canada. All this chipping away leads us down a slippery slope. As Canadians and how we think of ourselves as fair-minded and protectors of human rights, I do not think it is a slope that we want to go down.

Some weeks or months back we had a debate in the House about replacement workers. A private member's bill on replacement workers was defeated. I remind the House that Liberal governments between 1993 and 2006 helped defeat 10 anti-replacement worker private members' bills in the House. I am citing this from the Montreal Gazette, which published a story on it today.

This is something that ought to be of great concern to all Canadians, and certainly I am personally concerned about it. I know my party is.

On the specific dispute at hand, we have to remind ourselves that the Canadian Industrial Relations Board ruled this a legal strike. When the strike originally took place back in February, workers, who were under the direction of their democratically elected negotiating committee, were negotiating terms to go back to work back in February, but the government kept pushing for back to work legislation. I recall this because the media kept reporting that back to work legislation would be introduced.

They came to a tentative agreement. As sometimes happens with tentative agreements, they are not imposed on people. The agreement needs to be ratified. The membership voted 79% against the offer, and it was their legal right to do so. They began rotating strikes while agreeing to maintain commuter service. However, in response to a fairly limited dispute, CN decided to lock out all the workers. The situation with which we are presented now is not a strike. We are presented with a lockout. In essence we are dealing with an employer strike.

As I said earlier, in the normal course of operations, the balance of power is very heavily weighted toward the employer and that this is the only opportunity for people to get their issues addressed. This heavy-handed behaviour on the part of CN is rewarded by the government with back to work legislation, which in fact endorses what CN is doing. It endorses its heavy-handed approach. It is an approach that undermines the democratic legal rights of the people in the workplace.

All through bargaining, CN has used back to work legislation as a bargaining chip, and that is not the first time this has happened.

Let us look at some of the issues the people in this workplace are trying to deal with at the bargaining table, like worker safety and railway safety.

A recent study was conducted by Transport Canada a couple of years ago that highlighted rather serious concerns in rail safety. The public maybe does not see all the day to day safety concerns. We do see derailments. Some of these are huge and they affect our communities. They endanger our communities. People scratch their heads and say, “How do we prevent this? It is costly, destructive and wasteful. How do we prevent these derailments?

Study after study will show that probably the best way to prevent derailments is top-notch, high quality safety measures and top-notch, high quality investment in infrastructure that ensures the tracks, the rail beds, all of the equipment being used is absolutely in top condition so derailments are much less likely.

In the agreement CN was seeking to increase the number of hours workers would spend away from home. It is already 80 hours a week. It sounds kind of like the life of a member of Parliament. On the part of the union, it was trying to get better rest provisions, washroom breaks, a 40 minute lunch on a 9 hour shift, which sounds pretty reasonable to me, an end to 16 hour workdays and a number of safety measures. There have been over 100 derailments in Canada in 2005.

These are serious issues. If I am not in that workplace, I have trouble maybe relating to those issues. I do not know them as well as the people who live in these conditions day in and day out, whether they are in the union or in the company. That is why the process of collective bargaining works so well. Those two parties, which know the workplace, the issues, the concerns, maybe from a different perspective in the bargaining process, have to sit down and hammer these issues out and come to a mutually agreeable solution.

Again, CN has been less than stellar in terms of bargaining in good faith. It has been relying on the Canada Industrial Relations Board to rule the strike illegal, which it did not, and then wait for back to work legislation.

We have heard concerns in the House about the economy and the impact on it because of this dispute. I remind us all that this is a lockout, not a strike. However, fair and safe working conditions are equally important to the Canadian economy as the continuation of the transport of goods. The economic impact of a derailment, for example, is an enormous waste of our resources. If through this process we can address some of the safety and infrastructure concerns of the railway system, that would also be very good for the economy.

I have heard members talk about the cost to the economy of the strike back in February. I remind my hon. colleagues that many other factors were involved in the delays in shipments back in February in addition to this dispute. There was a refinery fire in Ontario. There were serious weather delays both in Canada and the U.S. that caused delays in the transport of goods. There was also a general downturn in business that affected some levels of production in the manufacturing sector and in other sectors as well.

I also remind the House that the managers are working. Managers are on the job, so it is not as though the rail industry has completely ground to a halt. Managers are working at CN, and there are other forms of transit available, including other railways. However, I do not at all pretend that some farmers and other shippers are not affected. Whenever there is a dispute, people are affected. That is why it is incumbent upon both sides in a dispute to get to the bargaining table in good faith to legitimately try to address the issues affecting them and to come to a resolve as quickly as possible so that any impact is as small as possible.

However, when we impose back to work legislation like this in a ham-fisted way, it sides with the employer. It denies people the right to a fair collective agreement because they get an imposed agreement that may not, in any way, deal with the legitimate concerns that they have brought to the bargaining table. It is simply not fair to them.

My colleague earlier talked about the importance of rail to our country. We are a country that was built on the railway. It is a key part of our history. It is part of our heritage and it created the ties that bind us as a nation. A country as vast and rich as Canada, with a fairly small population, ought to be a world leader when it comes to rail. Whether it is freight or passenger transportation, we ought to have the fastest, the best, the most efficient transportation system by rail than anywhere else in the world. When I hear about safety concerns, when I hear about derailments, when I hear that people are not being treated fairly at work, that is a terrible thing.

This round of negotiations, because it is ending up here in the debate in the House of Commons, reminds us all about the need to have a rail system that is top-notch, that we invest in the infrastructure to maintain a top-notch rail transportation system, that safety is a priority, and that we have to build on our history to improve our rail transportation system for the future.

I think this back to work legislation is another bad step in a bad series of steps to erode the rights of working people.

[Railway Operations Legislation, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, every time there is a labour dispute obviously there are complicating circumstances. If the situation were easy and clear-cut, the parties would work it out themselves.

Here we have the situation of a private corporation in very difficult bargaining with its bargaining agent. Surely where there is a situation where the agreement is not being achieved by the two parties and that is creating an impact on the economy, the appropriate response by the government is not to come down with a sledgehammer. The appropriate response on the part of the government is to work with the parties to see where the roadblocks are and to do everything possible to assist those parties to come to a freely negotiated collective agreement.

If there were no economic impact in a dispute, I guess one would have to ask what pressure does either party have in taking either lockout or strike action. There is always consequences in a dispute.

The question, though, is will these parties have a democratic right to find a freely negotiated solution with, ideally, the assistance of the government, or will the government come down in an untimely fashion and take away that democratic process by forcing this vote with closure today?

It is not a good precedent for the government to embark on this course of action and I would urge it to reconsider.

[Petitions, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition has 387 signatures. The petitioners are calling for the federal minimum wage to be reintroduced and raised to $10 an hour. The minimum wage was abolished in 1996 under the previous Liberal government. A minimum wage of $10 an hour would just approach the poverty level for a single person. If a minimum wage were established at the federal level, the influence would extend beyond workers in the federal jurisdiction because it could serve as a best practice for labour standards across the country. The petition calls for passage of my minimum wage Bill C-375.

[Petitions, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present two petitions. The first petition is from 65 members of the Polish Canadian community in my riding. The petition calls for the lifting of the requirement for visitors visas for people coming from Poland. Poland is now part of the EU and Poland uses all of the same biometric passport technology and other secure passport identification that other EU countries use.

The lifting of the visitor visa requirements would increase family visitation, tourism, cultural exchanges, trade missions and is strongly supported by my community which has a large Polish Canadian component.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2007, April 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the government has an obligation to respond to the needs of all Canadians. We are in a period of budget surpluses and the economy is doing well. As I said earlier, it is the people who in many cases are not doing well.

We have an opportunity, that does not come along very often, to take the initiative and make up for the cuts that have happened in past years by investing in housing, children, and investing in a meaningful way in post-secondary education and the arts. We have an opportunity to really invest in nation building. From that perspective, I believe the government has failed.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2007, April 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know how the member can stand in the House with a straight face and turn his back on the children of Canada. I think that is a disgrace.

This country has an obligation to the children of Canada to create a national child care program. To put the falsehood to the member's argument that this is only provincial jurisdiction, why did the government offer tax cuts to corporations to create child care spaces? We told the government that those tax cuts would not create a single child care space and, guess what? We were right.

Our federal government has an obligation to act in the best interests of Canadian children. We need a national child care program and all the fudging by the government will not get it out of that responsibility.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2007, April 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the implementation of the budget but it is not a pleasure to examine this budget. I and my party view it as an incredible missed opportunity for Canadians.

After years of sustained surpluses and the economy doing very well, we are seeing, however, that more and more Canadians are not doing well. The budget had a chance to amend the damage of deep cuts implemented by previous governments to social and physical infrastructures in our country.

It was a chance to bring Canada into the 21st century by investing in children's early education, post-secondary education in a meaningful way and in adult lifelong learning. It was a chance to ensure that no Canadian lives without shelter or goes to bed hungry. It was a chance to ensure that the most vulnerable Canadians, those with mental and physical disabilities, those suffering from addictions, seniors, those facing the barriers of racism, poverty and abuse get a helping hand and firm support. Frankly, the budget failed them.

It is a budget that has failed to close the growing inequality gap in our country. In addition, it has failed to adequately tackle the challenge of climate change.

I will first speak to the growing prosperity gap. With ongoing billions in corporate tax cuts, the budget will further widen, not shrink, the gap between those families at the top end and the rest of us, the middle and working class families.

After years of sustained surpluses, we now see the benefits primarily going to the top 10% of families as opposed to those in the bottom 10%, and this is at a 30 year high.

The budget fails to reinstate a federal minimum wage cancelled by the previous government and set it at $10 an hour, which would be the poverty level which should at least be the minimum in this country. We need to provide a living wage for people and it is time that our federal government took the lead with this important initiative.

There was nothing in the budget for affordable housing despite a growing crisis of homelessness on the streets of Toronto where I represent the riding of Parkdale—High Park. Parents and their children in my community continue to need a national child care program, although with the government and with the budget we have seen an ABC approach, which is anything but child care.

There is the money to sustain current spaces but this is not a child care system. It is not a system of early education and development. Parents in my riding tell me repeatedly that this is creating a crisis in their families. Parents are spending up to $1,500 a month per child for child care. Even at these exorbitant rates, hundreds of children are on waiting lists to get adequate care. It is simply disgraceful in a country with our wealth and where we pretend to be a modern society and a modern economy that we are behind the rest of the developed world in this regard.

I see on the streets of Toronto and in my community the growing signs of poverty. I see people homeless on the streets. I see the distress of families with young children who line up for breakfast programs and free meals on a Sunday evening. More than one million workers in the Toronto area earn less than $29,800 a year, many of them new Canadians who have been here for generations. Many workers of colour are women but they all share one thing in common: the work they do is often undervalued and under-paid.

In Toronto, over 200,000 children live below the poverty level, which is almost 20%, and this rate is growing.

I must recognize the passing of June Callwood, a journalist and social activist who, increasingly in her later years, became so distressed that as a society we could not marshal the political will to resolve the crisis of child poverty in a country so wealthy and especially with surplus budgets year after year and a growing economy. I am saddened that June Callwood passed without seeing a government that would take the initiative to come up with a plan to tackle this blight on our society today and for the future. We are still waiting for a government to do that but clearly in this budget the government has not.

Immigrants and newcomers make up about half of Toronto's population but 57% of them live in poverty. The child poverty rate among recent immigrants has been growing in every decade since the 1980s. I know an issue that newcomers tell me about repeatedly that is so tragic is that skilled workers, such as engineers, doctors, specialists and professionals of all kinds, who come to Canada cannot work in their field because they cannot get proper accreditation of their credentials.

I know the government said that it would study the situation but for the families that are living in poverty because the parents are driving taxis or working in bagel stops instead of practising in their profession as an engineer, a psychologist or a dentist, a study does not cut it. People want action and results and they want their credentials recognized. They want a system that welcomes them and recognizes their credentials now, not in several years to come.

The government did initiate the tax credit for low income people. Tax credits can be beneficial and protect the net incomes of earnings from living wages through compensating workers for income tax assessments and social insurance charges. The tax credits can address fluctuations and deficiencies in labour market hours which we know to be a big problem.

However, the adoption of living wage standards, that is a $10 an hour minimum wage, and the introduction of work tax credits must take place together. If not, then work tax credits become subsidies to employers for paying poverty wages. These subsidies would then provide unfair market advantages to less responsible employers over employers who pay living wages. The two must go together.

I also want to comment on the issue of infrastructure which is a huge issue in the city of Toronto. The budget has failed to deliver for large urban centres such as Toronto. In fact, I would argue that it is a step back for Toronto. My constituents in Parkdale—High Park tell me that they work hard, they pay their taxes and they want to see more of those taxes invested into our city in the critical social and physical infrastructure that we need.

So much of what we need in Toronto right now is borne by our property taxes. Property taxes are going through the roof. Seniors, especially in their twilight years, who are in their own homes are squeezed because they have fixed incomes and their property taxes keep going up. Property taxes are regressive and disproportionately affect working and middle income people and seniors are especially hard hit. Property taxes also make it hard on small businesses across the city.

Toronto is Canada's largest city and it has the sixth largest government in Canada. It is home to a diverse population of about 2.6 million people. It is the economic engine of Canada and one of the greenest and most creative cities in North America. We need a national transit strategy like the one I have been calling for and the one outlined by the big city mayors. The economy and the environment of Toronto depend on better transit, more buses, streetcars and subways.

I know the government has announced funding to extend the subway to York University and Vaughan, which is a positive step, but we need ongoing, sustained, multi-year funding and a plan to grow transit in the city of Toronto as the city is growing.

Another huge disappointment is that culture has received such short shrift in the budget. It is only a part of a page in the budget. There is nothing for the big six projects in the city of Toronto and there is no new money for CBC which will affect not only the people who work in this sector, but will affect us as a nation because this is so important to our voice and to who we are as a country.

In summary I would like to say that with no urban strategy, with no help for the working poor and with very little in environmental protection, this is a budget that is a step back for Toronto and for Canadians in general.