Bill C-6 (Historical)

Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act

An Act to provide for the resumption and continuation of postal services

This enactment provides for the resumption and continuation of postal services and imposes a final offer selection process to resolve matters remaining in dispute between the parties.

Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Perhaps it came through one of those private couriers.

I do acknowledge that this dispute is causing--

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

On a point of order, the hon. member for Scarborough—Agincourt.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I am just wondering if my colleague is asking unanimous consent in order to table what she just pointed out in the letter. Is that what she is asking?

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

I thank you, but I did not hear the hon. member ask for any kind of unanimous consent. I am sure she understands that she can do that at any time.

The hon. member for Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Madam Speaker, what I would say in response to the member's question is that I do understand that this dispute is causing hardship for many people, not just businesses. There are many other Canadians who depend on Canada Post. What I would say is that it appears that who is holding these people to ransom is the strong, stable, Conservative national government those members like to talk about, because that is who locked out these workers and shut down the postal services.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

Very briefly, the hon. member for Saanich--Gulf Islands.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, I will try to make this brief, but I want to thank my friend from Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca for his presentation.

We have had some discussion in this House about the right to strike and the nature of the law in this country. It was a few speeches back, so I ask my friend from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca to forgive me for asking him if he can recall the B.C. hospital workers' case at the Supreme Court in the year 2007, which I believe made it very clear that governments cannot interfere in the basic rights of all workers, not just unionized workers. Labour rights are human rights. That is, I believe, the main ratio of that case, and if we recognize that, this legislation may well be illegal. I wonder if the member from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca has a view on that.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

The hon. member from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca has 40 seconds to respond.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Let us see, Madam Speaker, if I have a 40-second view. What I would say is that I thank the hon. member for her question, and I think the important part of her question is to move the emphasis off this specious argument about right to strike, when what we are talking about is the right to free collective bargaining and the importance of that right in our society.

[Jinny Sims, NDP, Newton—North Delta, BC]

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.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Madam Speaker, the members opposite and this member have been talking about the need for workers to have high quality, high paying jobs. That is precisely what our government has been doing over the last 30 months. In fact, we have had the best economic job-creating engine in the developed world.

Do not take it just from me. Take it from the latest release from the labour force survey of June 10, some two weeks ago, from Statistics Canada. It says that over the past 12 months, full-time employment rose by 224,000 jobs while part-time employment was up 50,000 jobs. In other words, for every one part-time job the Canadian economy created in the last 12 months, we created five full-time jobs.

These are not just low quality, low paying jobs. These are good jobs. On May 9, CIBC released its economics report by Benjamin Tal. I will just quote from that.

It says:

More than 60% of the full-time jobs created since April of last year have been high-paying positions.

[Jinny Sims, NDP, Newton—North Delta, BC]

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.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Madam Speaker, I have no doubt that the hon. member speaks with great sincerity. I know of her from British Columbia. I listened to her speech and in fact I have sat here and listened to a lot of the speeches made by the hon. members of the New Democratic Party. They are sincere and I know that they believe in what they say.

I want to ask a question though. The question is simply this. I am a physician. As far as I am concerned, what is done must result in a positive outcome and one that will change the status quo. I do not understand standing in the House and repeating those same things over and over. The point is made.

We in the Liberal Party actually agree with everything that the NDP is saying. It is not only its members who have any sort of hold and great ambition for the workers. The Liberals also believe that workers need their rights. We believe that the government has been extremely intrusive and heavy-handed in this piece of legislation. It has intervened itself at the table and it has set some restrictions on arbitration or on bargaining that are unfair.

We agree and want the outcome to be a win-win. I am listening to a lot of discussion here that in the end will change nothing. It will be a lose-lose. I would like to suggest that if all of us really do care about a win-win answer, one that will support the needs of Canadians and that will also support the rights of the workers, then we should do something about it.

The Liberal Party has some amendments here. I would like to see us go to the amendments. They are solutions. If the government says that it has goodwill, then let us see it listen and change its mind and show goodwill by listening to those amendments. Let us get to a resolution instead of the talk.

[Jinny Sims, NDP, Newton—North Delta, BC]

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.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Madam Speaker, I find this debate wholesome and informative, and I intend to stay here until the end of this debate.

I also appreciated the speech and comments by my colleague. I do not have a labour union background. My family is not from labour unions. For a short time I was in a labour union.

I am wondering if my colleague could tell me about the effect that a lockout has on workers and on morale within companies.