Bill C-18 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Superannuation Act, to validate certain calculations and to amend other Acts

This enactment amends the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Superannuation Act to add the provisions necessary for the implementation of amendments made to that Act by the Public Sector Pension Investment Board Act that relate to elective service and pension transfer agreements. It also brings into force certain provisions enacted by the Public Sector Pension Investment Board Act. Finally, the enactment validates certain calculations and amends other Acts.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Superannuation Act

[Diane Bourgeois, Bloc, Terrebonne—Blainville, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in response to my colleague's question, I would say that, first, I would like him to identify exactly what I said that was inaccurate. I would be very surprised and it is important that he tell me. Second, I would not compare this situation to the Montreal police service. Where the legislation creates a problem—and this is what I was talking about—is that when someone from a police force from another province, or from Quebec, wants to join the RCMP, he can bring with him his six months of training to become a police officer, while RCMP cadets cannot count those six months towards their superannuation.

Let us suppose that I am a police officer from Alberta who wants to join the RCMP. I have 18 years of seniority, plus six months, while a young recruit would not even have those six months. That is where the problem lies, since young people are being penalized. In Quebec, we called these “orphan clauses”.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join the debate on Bill C-18 regarding RCMP pensions.

I want to compliment my colleague from St. John's East for his work on this issue on behalf of the NDP caucus. I think the speech he made in the House recently capably outlines the NDP's position on Bill C-18.

To put my remarks about RCMP pensions and the public service pensions generally in context, I would like to recognize a former NDP member from my riding of Winnipeg Centre. The hon. Reverend Stanley Knowles represented the riding I now represent from 1942 until he was felled by a stroke in 1984. He dedicated much of his political career to fighting for pensions and old age security. He is recognized by many as the father of the old age security system in this country because of his doggedness in sticking to this one issue over a 42-year career.

The notion of ending poverty among the aged and income security had its origins in this country in 1925-26, when my predecessor for the riding of Winnipeg Centre, J. S. Woodsworth, with the Independent Labour Party, was elected to the House of Commons.

In 1925-26, William Lyon Mackenzie King found himself in a minority situation. Many students of parliamentary history will know the King-Byng affair. King was in a minority situation, and he needed the support of J. S. Woodsworth and the small Independent Labour Party. A. A. Heaps, another member of Parliament from Manitoba, was a labour leader, one of the leaders of the Winnipeg general strike, as was J. S. Woodsworth.

It is interesting, in fact the Government of Canada wanted to send J. S. Woodsworth to prison for his role as a leader of the Winnipeg general strike but the people of Winnipeg Centre sent him to Ottawa to be their member of Parliament instead. He stayed there for 22 years.

It is interesting as well that the charges of treason against J. S. Woodsworth were laid against him because he was quoting the Bible, the Book of Isaiah. He was speaking to a large gathering of strikers during the 1919 Winnipeg general strike. He pointed out that we are our brother's keeper on this earth, et cetera, and for these words he was charged with inciting a riot and was thrown in prison.

Like many leaders of the 1919 general strike, and it is the 90th anniversary of that strike this year, they were elected to the provincial legislatures, to the municipal chambers of Winnipeg and to the federal House of Commons from their prison cells.

It was J. S. Woodsworth who cut a deal with King in a letter, a promissory note. J. S. Woodsworth said, “I will support your government”--the King government of the day--“in exchange for old age security. If this Parliament will introduce old age security, old age pensions, I will support your government”.

King agreed to that in a famous letter, which is in the archives of the New Democratic Party. It was the member for Winnipeg Centre, J. S. Woodsworth, who used his political leverage to introduce pensions in this country.

Fittingly, after 20-some years as the member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre, when Woodsworth was succeeded, Stanley Knowles took up that crusade. He dedicated a long and illustrious parliamentary career to establishing old age security. He was not only satisfied when he achieved the old age security of $50 a month, he started another fight that very day. The very day that it passed in the House of Commons another battle began, to have it indexed to inflation so that old age security would be meaningful.

I think we all know that while the incidence of poverty among seniors, especially elderly women, is still problematic, it is nothing like it used to be. We have a fairly robust retirement income system for our seniors.

Having said that, Bill C-18 deals with the RCMP pension, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Superannuation Act. It makes a modest reform to the administration of that act.

It is impossible to talk about the RCMP pension without talking about public sector pensions more generally, because the two are directly connected.

The RCMP pension became an issue of great controversy at the public accounts committee in the last Parliament. The head of the RCMP was hauled before that committee, and she was grilled about her involvement in the administration of that pension plan. She was found to be in contempt of Parliament, an extraordinarily unusual circumstance. She was hauled before the bar of Parliament and found to be in contempt of this place. The administration of the RCMP pension has not been without controversy, and it should not be tread upon lightly.

As a former trade union leader and trustee of an employee benefit plan, I can say that all public and private sector pensions should have joint trustees. There should be representation on the board of trustees of the beneficiaries of the plan, the retirees who are getting benefits from the plan as well as the people making contributions to the plan. Either they or their representatives should be adequately represented. I would argue they should be represented fifty-fifty so their voices can be heard on the administration of these pension plans. They are huge. Most of the trading on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange is in fact from employee benefit plans that are moving money around.

This is the new face of capitalism. Union pension plans are driving the venture capital markets, and the markets generally. It takes a fair amount of expertise to watch over that amount of trading, to make sure that it is done in the best interests of the beneficiary. We certainly have all learned a lot of lessons because of the complex financial engineering that goes on in the financial markets of today. It takes a great deal of expertise to make sure our pensions are being cared for, and the RCMP plan is no different.

I would say that white collar crime is very much a blue collar issue. We need to be able to trust the financial statements of the companies in which our pensions are invested. If we cannot trust those financial statements, our financial security is in deep, deep trouble, no matter what we do with the RCMP Superannuation Act or any of the pension legislation.

The first thing we have to do is clean up the corporate governance on the financial markets where our pensions are invested. That is for another day, I suppose. One thing that has always bugged me, and I will raise it here to put it on the record, is that in the corporate world, at least in Canada, we can hire the same company to be our tax adviser as our auditor.

Surely to God we have learned the lesson from Enron that we want our auditors to be independent. We do not want the same company, Arthur Andersen, to give us advice on how to structure our books and play games to avoid taxes, how to juggle money, hide things and play the shell game, and then be the same company that audits those books and puts a seal of approval on them.

What is a blue collar trustee of a union pension plan supposed to do? Who are they supposed to believe? All they can do is read the financial statements that are put in front of them to try to figure out if they are accurate. We have to be able to trust the financial statements of those companies or we are in deeper trouble than the administration of this RCMP plan.

Let me also raise the issue that surpluses in public sector pension plans should be considered the property, the deferred wages, of the beneficiaries of the plan.

As his last action as Treasury Board president, Marcel Massé changed all that in 2000. There was a $30 billion actuarial surplus in the public service pension plan. He knew this action was political suicide, so, as he was going out the door, he passed a bill that said employees had no proprietary claim on surpluses in pension plans.

That was news to us. We always thought our pension plans were our earnings held in trust for us and invested wisely so we could retire with some dignity. In fact, we negotiated that at the bargaining table. Instead of taking a $1 raise, we would take a 50¢ raise and the other 50¢ would be put in the pension plan to grow and we would take it when we needed it. Marcel Massé changed all that.

It has had a ripple effect in the private sector as well, which claims that any surplus in a pension plan is the property of the employer not the employees. That should be condemned. In fact, it should be fixed.

There is an assault on pensions generally. It is absolutely mind-boggling that analysts of the day, after reviewing the global economic crisis in North America at least, are not finding fault with bad management or bloated CEO benefits. They are not finding fault with car companies that manufacture products nobody wants.

These analysts have arrived at the source of the problem of our economic crisis. It turns out that greedy union pension plans are dragging us all down the road of perdition. We did not realize this as trade unionists when we were negotiating fair retirement benefits for our members. We did not realize we were dragging down capitalism as we knew it.

Apparently those corporate interests that have always had pensions in their crosshairs, the guys who have always wanted to get out from under these legacy costs, in the spirit of never let a good crisis go to waste, are blaming their economic stupidity, their incompetence, on employee benefit plans, the pensions of members, my pension, and the pensions of auto workers, forestry workers and steelworkers. Somehow we are dragging down capitalists with our greed.

All the empirical evidence and all the numbers indicate that if Canadian auto workers worked for nothing, it would only bring down the cost of a car by 5% to 7%, and those pieces of junk could still not be sold because the car companies design cars that nobody wants to buy. They found some way to blame employee benefit plans.

Corporate Canada has wanted to get rid of this for 20 or 30 years. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Here they have an excuse to put the pension plans of workers in their crosshairs and set their sights on them.

The public sector perhaps is the last bastion where reason and logic prevails in terms of employee benefit plans. We are not going to be deterred by this sort of PR campaign by the corporate sector in trying to assign blame to workers for its own failures.

I personally feel if we had more real engineers coming out of our universities instead of financial engineers, we would be in a lot less trouble. They have made the financial market so complex and so incomprehensible that even investors do not really understand derivatives markets and hedge fund markets, et cetera.

A trustee on a public sector pension plan, or a private sector pension plan for that matter, has to keep up to speed with all of the financial engineering grads being pumped out of MBA programs. There is a fiduciary responsibility on the part of trustees of these benefit plans to act always in the best interests of the beneficiaries. Shop floor trustees have that idea in mind. I am not sure the management side trustees have the same goal in mind. They worry more about what they call the legacy costs, the burden on their operation, than about the well-being and the income security of retirees.

In the context of the RCMP Superannuation Act, a lot of these things can and will be addressed when free collective bargaining is introduced into the relationship between the RCMP and the Government of Canada.

I would like to know why the government is appealing the Supreme Court ruling stating that the RCMP should have the right to free collective bargaining. This has been a long time coming. Those who are opposed to the idea would say that we cannot have the RCMP go on strike because of national security. That is a complete red herring. There are many essential services where people do not have the right to strike, but they do have the right to free collective bargaining. It is the only way to achieve a compensation package that is free of interference and that is argued on its merits, not on the imbalance of the power structure between the employer and the employee. We get away from the imbalance in the power structure and we arrive at a fair compensation package.

In the context of that package, I assure the House that the representatives of the employees would want adequate representation, if not equal representation, on their superannuation plan, their pension plan, especially with the shenanigans and the hanky-panky that went on in recent years. There is a bit of a paucity of trust, faith and confidence in their own package.

As I have said, two representatives from Winnipeg Centre paved the way to income security for retirees. Every day I take my seat in the House of Commons, I am very aware of the honour to follow in the footsteps of these two great men, J. S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles, both ministers, both men of the cloth. Both believed fully in using their position in Parliament to benefit not only the constituents they represented, but the people of Canada generally. I commend them for choosing income security for seniors as a main priority.

That struggle is not over; it continues. The very modest points in Bill C-18 we agree add some modicum of fairness to the RCMP Superannuation Act. The notion that one could purchase a period of past service for pension service is fair. That is why we can support the idea.

However, as a member of the Standing Committee on Government Operations, where the bill found itself for the committee stage, we heard representation from representatives of the RCMP. I am not making reference to the SSR, which is the official representatives for the purposes of bargaining for the RCMP. I am speaking of an informal group that may wind up being the advocates for RCMP, and that is the Mounted Police Professional Association of Canada. It would certainly seek to be the legally recognized bargaining agent for RCMP.

The courts have given the Government of Canada 18 months to remedy this situation and to allow for free negotiations through collective bargaining. It will have to recognize a bargaining agent. I urge the government to drop its appeal and allow that 18 month period to begin immediately so RCMP officers can have the right to representation of their own choice.

There is no compelling reason whatsoever why RCMP officers should not have the right to free collective bargaining just like the rest of the public service. If their services are deemed essential, then their right to withhold their services can be limited and truncated, but there is no excuse for them not to have free collective bargaining.

I hope the matters we have dealt with today will be dealt with properly at the bargaining table.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Winnipeg Centre gave quite a discourse about the public service and its pensions. He quite rightly pointed out that the proposed amendments in the bill are modest.

They are the right things to do and we should support them, but there is a bigger issue at stake. It is this lack of fairness that the RCMP faces because it cannot enter into a collective agreement. Its members do not have an opportunity to form unions or stand up for their rights. It is perplexing why the government would not allow RCMP officers to have the same rights that other law enforcement agencies in the country have, whether municipal or provincial.

I will point out why this is such an important issue. As the member has noted, the public accounts committee spent a tremendous amount of time investigating the pension scandal in the RCMP. A number of senior officials ended up having to resign. One was found in contempt of Parliament. However, most people think that this is incredibly unfair. If RCMP officers die in the line of duty, what do we give them? We give them two months salary. That is what their family gets. Is this fair? Why have we ended up with such a lack of equality and fairness in the system?

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Etobicoke Centre raises a very compelling point.

First, I think I made the point in my remarks and I will restate it now. The government should drop its appeal and heed the court ruling, which said there was no justification for denying the RCMP the right to free collective bargaining that other police forces enjoy with their municipalities. It is the only way to arrive at a fair compensation package, free of interference and the imbalanced power relationship between employer and employee. If they are both at the bargaining table, with equal rights under the law, things can be negotiated fairly.

As far as the compensation for people killed in the line of duty, I know first responders and public safety officers have fought for quite some time to have recognition in our country comparable to the United States. If a public safety officer, or first responder, or firefighter or paramedic is killed in the line of duty, he or she gets a compensation of $350,000 above and beyond anything that may be in the collective agreement. We support that. I would like to see that come through Parliament as well.

[Guy André, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Mr. Speaker, as my Bloc colleague pointed out, we will be supporting this bill at second reading so it may be studied in committee.

We are concerned about how members of the RCMP who have reached retirement age are treated. The entire Canadian public service and the private sector should take note of this situation with the RCMP. For instance, preventing the RCMP from unionizing and negotiating a collective agreement, and preventing people from mobilizing to negotiate their working conditions constitutes an attack on their freedom. They are entitled to working conditions that fulfill their aspirations.

We in the Bloc Québécois are always surprised to see that we are never able to get anti-scab legislation passed, even though we have been trying for several years. Once again, it is surprising that, in a Canadian public institution, people are not allowed to unionize.

I wonder what my hon. NDP colleague thinks about these absolutely regressive measures in this Canadian institution.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, as a trade unionist, I am the first to agree that the right to free collective bargaining is one of the basic tenets of a western democracy.

It is appalling that the government of the day is appealing a court order that upholds the basic fundamental right of workers to organize, bargain collectively and, where fitting, withhold their services. In the case of police forces, it may well be that the labour board and the Minister of Labour would decide they would not have the right to withhold their services, at least in certain capacities. However, that does not negate their right to free collective bargaining and to those basic protections under the Labour Code that others enjoy.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Winnipeg Centre for his comments, particularly the history lesson we received. It was valuable for everyone in the House to hear and very important, but also his comments about collective bargaining, which other members have also discussed.

There is another point concerning the RCMP that has not been touched on and I would like to ask the member about, that being a pay raise that had been promised in 2008 by the current government and then was rolled back in the budget. The Conservatives say they have an agenda on crime, and in fact, have a police caucus that supports the RCMP. I would like the member for Winnipeg Centre to make some comments on that if he would.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Thunder Bay—Rainy River for reminding me of one of the important background points in this whole debate.

First of all, Bill C-18 has been criticized because it is not often that a bill amending the pension act for the RCMP is going to come up before Parliament. It may not happen again for another decade. So there is a missed opportunity not to address some of the other glaring oversights and shortcomings to the bill. We were not successful in getting amendments through committee stage.

Secondly, the morale of our national police force, the RCMP, is so struck down at this point in time because of the rollback. The government will say it did not roll back the wages, but in actual fact, there were increases of 3.5% scheduled to take effect for this year and next. The government cancelled the projected wage increase and dictated that it should be 1.5%. This perhaps is the best and most compelling argument for the right to free collective bargaining and negotiations, as opposed to the interference of the employer, in this case, with the absolute power beyond reason, beyond logic, beyond the employer's ability to pay. None of these matters entered into the equation at all. They simply received a letter in the mail saying their increase was going to be 1.5% instead of 3.5%.

For a party that claims to be tough on crime and sympathetic to the police, it is a hell of a way to treat their employees.

[Claude Gravelle, NDP, Nickel Belt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Winnipeg talked about bargaining. Being a trade unionist myself, I know what he is talking about. He talked about bargaining for a dollar and putting 50¢ in wages and 50¢ in the pension plan.

When a pension plan has a lot of extra money in it, companies will take it to do as they please, a lot like what the Liberals did with the employment insurance plan when we had billions of dollars in excess. I would like to ask my colleague whether, in the future, this Parliament could pass a law that would prevent this from happening, that would prevent future governments from changing this law and would prevent companies and the government from taking money in pension funds.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, surpluses in pension plans should be considered the deferred wages and the property of the beneficiaries and employees covered by the plan. It is not a pile of dough that employers can get their hands on. Marcel Massé, the former Treasury Board president, should be criticized and condemned for being the one to set this precedent. It should be this Parliament, perhaps even this session of this Parliament, that establishes once and for all that the employer has no right to the deferred wages in the surplus of a pension plan. That money is the employees' money, held in trust for when they need it in their retirement years.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill C-18. It is incredibly timely, given the fact that we are currently in the middle of National Police Week. We are always having to seek ways to ensure that we strengthen our national police force. Certainly one of the ways we can do that is ensuring that they are properly compensated, and after a lifetime of service and dedication, that they receive the pension they so rightly deserve.

In general, certainly I support the bill. There are a number of important measures that ensure the flexibility needed for RCMP officers to achieve the pension they should have. There have been some technical problems in the past that have prohibited that from happening, which the bill largely addresses. However, there are a number of concerns that I still have that will not stop me from supporting the bill but need to be highlighted nonetheless.

The first issue of concern, which came out in committee, was the fact that the first six months that RCMP officers spend training at Depot is not counted towards their pensionable service time. This is a concern, because clearly it is a period of time when they are engaged with the force and are working full time in its employ. If there is a technical difference in the fact that they are in training as opposed to actually being an officer, we need to recognize that time, particularly when we talk about the importance of recruitment and how difficult it is, with the number of retirements that are happening, to make sure that we have the number of recruits and the quality of recruits flowing into the system to keep the force strong.

I had the opportunity to visit the depot in Winnipeg and talk with a lot of the cadets there, and the calibre is incredible. We are very fortunate to have some amazing men and women who are stepping forward to serve in the RCMP. However, it really does occur to a person that if they are spending an enormous amount of time there, that is time that should be counted towards their pensions.

There are a number of other aggravating factors, though, that are important to bring up in this discussion. When we are talking about trying to fix some of the issues that create problems for recruiting for the RCMP, it is important to mention some of the things that are happening currently.

The first one that caused me grave concern was the issue of pay parity with other police forces. I recall very clearly the Prime Minister being in Vancouver and making a promise to RCMP officers that he would ensure they would receive the same wages as other police forces and the issue of pay parity was one of fundamental equality.

We expected the Prime Minister to live up to his word. The government went so far as to even sign a contract with RCMP officers to fulfill that commitment of pay parity, before it was promptly ripped up and thrown out. The promise was broken and his back was turned on those RCMP officers.

That had, obviously, a devastating impact on morale, but it also has a huge impact upon retention and on hiring new officers. It is very difficult to get somebody to come to the RCMP as a recruit if we are not even willing to pay them the same amount as other police are being paid.

If the issue of breaking the promise on pay parity was not enough, the government went further. Just in the last number of days, the government made the decision to appeal a landmark decision of the Ontario Superior Court to allow the RCMP the right to choose whether or not they want to pursue collective bargaining.

This is a democratic choice enjoyed by every other police force in the country. In a western democracy such as ours, it is a right that we would expect all police forces to be able to enjoy. A number of people expressed surprise that it was not something the RCMP already had as a right to be able to explore.

The government appealed this decision, essentially sending the message that the democratic right of RCMP officers to have collective bargaining was something it did not support.

After the broken promise on pay parity, they were further kicked and morale further beaten down by having a government that said not only should they not be paid the same as other police officers, but they should not have the same democratic rights either.

To me, that is deeply concerning. It sends the wrong message to our men and women in the RCMP who do such an incredible job keeping our communities safe, and it is an abysmal failure of the government to live up to its rhetoric.

The government talks about being tough on crime, but being tough on crime means that it has to be supportive of the people who stop crime from happening, who work our streets and keep our communities safe. We have to be honest with them.

Trust is everything for police officers. They have to trust one another. When they go into dangerous situations, they have to know that a fellow officer has their back. Their word is their bond. So when trust is violated, it has an even greater consequence than it would perhaps have in other places. Therefore, that breach of trust is exceptionally serious.

I want to congratulate the member for Etobicoke Centre on a private member's bill that he brought up in the House today that addresses another matter of fundamental inequity. That is, when an RCMP officer is killed in the line of duty, essentially only two months' pay is made available.

That is in stark contrast to what is offered in most other police forces, where it is recognized that if an officer is killed in the line of duty, in service to his or her community, money should be given to the officer's family to allow it the opportunity to maintain living expenses, to pay bills, to keep its house, and to pay for groceries. Two months, frankly speaking, is wrong and needs to be corrected. I wholeheartedly support the efforts by the member for Etobicoke Centre to bring forward legislation to change that, because it is important.

With that as context and saying there are a number of other factors that we also need to be looking at, I can say that I support this bill, because it does achieve important ends. However, what I do not want to see happen is for us to pass this bill and think we have done our job.

There are a lot of other ways we have to support RCMP officers, such as paying them the same as other officers, giving them the same democratic rights as other police forces, ensuring that when they are killed in the line of duty the government supports their families, and making sure that we keep our word, that when a promise is made, such as the promise the Prime Minister made in Vancouver, that commitment is maintained.

With that, I look forward to the passage of this bill, as well as these other matters being addressed, and I will certainly support the private member's bill put forward by the member for Etobicoke Centre.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have listened very carefully to my colleague's speech. In it he commented that the government is claiming to be tough on crime, but in fact is preventing RCMP officers from having salaries equivalent to those earned by members of other Canadian police forces. At the same time, it is preventing them from having the same democratic rights, that is the right to unionize. That is an absolutely fair right.

We know that crime today is far more organized and complex than it used to be. There was a time 50 years ago when the mafia was top dog in the organized crime scene, but now we have the Chinese triads, the Japanese yakusa, the Russian mafia, the biker and street gangs, and all of these criminal groups demand increasing expertise from police forces, at a time of staff cutbacks. Yet they are still claiming to be tough on crime.

My question for my colleague is this: since the Liberals were in power before, what did they do to get tough on crime and to treat the RCMP properly?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, certainly the Liberal Party has a proud tradition of supporting the RCMP and recognizing the important work it does each and every day as a national police force.

When talking about being tough on crime, it has to go a lot further than rhetoric. I gave a lot of examples of how I feel the Conservative government has been very hard on police but not so much on crime.

As an example, when we look at last year's crime prevention budget, which is critical to preventing crimes and victimization from occurring in the first place, that budget was more than 50% unspent. In fact, in the last year that the Liberal government was in power, there was nearly $75 million being spent every year on crime prevention. Last year, it was down to somewhere around $15 million or $12 million spent on crime prevention.

We can look at the attempts by the Conservative government to gut the national registry for firearms, which both the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and the Canadian Police Association have said is an essential tool for them to combat crime and keep our streets safe.

We can look at the fact that our correctional system is rife with all kinds of problems. The correctional investigator is telling us that it is in many cases making the situation worse and the people being released are not getting the programs and services they need to deal with issues like addiction or mental health problems. We are treating our prisons like hospitals. When these people are released from these systems, they have a much greater likelihood of recidivism.

In so many ways, when we see the Conservatives being tough on police, we see them being soft on crime.

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague has referred to the inequity that exists with respect to the manner in which the RCMP is capable of doing its own negotiations, in a stand-alone labour relations context. He has also mentioned the fact that in balancing that out, the government, in order to validate the position it is taking that the RCMP must not have those same rights, is using the argument, I take it, that the RCMP, through the federal government, has entered into provincial contractual arrangements where it is now the last line of defence in many of those provinces that do not have a disagreement and it will use that in court to justify the position that it has taken in that appeal in denying the RCMP those universal standards of labour rights.

I wonder if my colleague could comment on whether that is a fair position to take, in the interests of equity, in the interests of it being perceived as protecting the public.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I think fundamentally the answer is no, that it is not a fair position to take, that it is not equitable, and that it treats the RCMP really as a second-class police force.

It is universally accepted that whether or not we are talking about firefighters, police officers or any officers, they have the right to collective bargaining. That is an essential part of their democratic right to ensure that their rights are treated fairly. I think that the Prime Minister's ability in Vancouver to break his word on pay parity, his ability to turn his back on RCMP officers and not pay them the wage that he had committed to them, just underscores the point that the RCMP should have the right to choose whether or not it wants to pursue collective bargaining.

So, in so many ways, I think this really is unjust and inequitable.