This bill was last introduced in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session, which ended in September 2013.
Lisa Raitt Conservative
This bill has received Royal Assent and is now law.
This is from the published bill.
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.
All sorts of information on this bill is available at LEGISinfo, an excellent resource from the Library of Parliament. You can also read the full text of the bill.
Dany Morin NDP Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC
Madam Speaker, the member just mentioned the CEO of Canada Post.
I am putting myself in the Conservatives' shoes. We are coming out of a recession, so everyone is tightening their belts. I understand that. The NDP stands in solidarity with everyone.
Should the CEO of Canada Post who, I believe, earns $497,000 a year, plus a 33% bonus, also have to tighten his belt to help resolve this dispute?
That question is for my NDP colleague, if he has an answer.
Romeo Saganash NDP Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC
Madam Speaker, I do not think that the CEO of Canada Post intends on doing what the member suggested. However, for the good of all the citizens who currently need postal services, I think it would be smart for him to put an end to the lockout.
The members on the other side seem to be fond of locks. We must unlock the doors of Canada Post. When the Prime Minister was not happy with how things were going here, he locked the doors of Parliament. When my leader, the leader of the official opposition, suggested meetings to find solutions together, what did the Prime Minister do? He suggested another lock.
Ted Hsu Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Madam Speaker, we are currently debating the hoist amendment to this unfair and dangerous bill.
I would like to know whether there are any negotiations.
I know that In a few hours the amendment will be defeated by the majority over there, and I would like to know if there are negotiations going on for what is going to happen next and how we are going to make progress.
I am not aboriginal, but I know I share with aboriginals and other Canadians the feeling that we want to see progress. We have to make progress at some point. We cannot let this unjust, unfair and dangerous law--
The Deputy Speaker Denise Savoie
Order, please. The hon. member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou.
Romeo Saganash NDP Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC
Madam Speaker, we have raised a number of questions from this side of the House. I think we have a very good idea of the amendments being proposed to this unfair bill. It would be great if there were an opening, but there is not. Everything is locked up.
Pierre Dionne Labelle NDP Rivière-du-Nord, QC
Madam Speaker, honourable members, brothers and sisters: lockout, lockout. It hurts to hear those words. I don't know whether the Speaker can see it from her Chair, but I have a bump here that dates back to the first lockout I took part in at Commonwealth Plywood some 30 years ago. The workers had been locked out, and the scabs were escorted in and out by police officers and private security services. Those security guards and police officers took billy clubs to the workers there and to the people who had come to support them. To my mind, a lockout is a violent measure. I see a member laughing over there, but that does not prevent it from being very violent. There is political violence in this kind of legislation.
For the Conservatives, when citizens demonstrate, it is often violent. Cutting jobs, imposing legislation, putting people out on the street, cutting $11 billion from public services: that is not violent for them. Making seniors wait in hospitals for 16 hours is not violent, no.
Lockout, lockout. This government loves locks; we should have suspected that. It also likes big fences around cities to protect them from dangerous and violent demonstrators. The summits of the powerful are protected from the legitimate demands of citizens.
This government really likes borders. It is putting a lot of money into border infrastructure, even in the backyard of the minister responsible for the Treasury Board. This government also likes prisons, lots of prisons with lots of locks.
To justify investing in prisons, the Prime Minister says there is a lot of unreported crime. Do workers who refuse to go back to work in response to a sorry piece of legislation commit that kind of unreported crime? Perhaps.
Touching their fences is another unreported crime that could help fill those prisons. That is dangerous. They arrested 1,200 individuals who dared to touch their fences; that is a major crime.
This government wants to lock the Canadian people into a system of logic, the logic of law and order. If things do not work the way it wants, it will put locks on our freedoms: the freedom to negotiate, the freedom to exercise pressure and eventually freedom of association perhaps. The only thing it will not put locks on is its privileges. No one puts a lock on the freedom to mine anywhere without the consent of the local communities. They have the right to operate a two-kilometre mine near a lake or near 62 rivers in the name of freedom of trade. They have the freedom to drill shale gas wells anywhere they want. They are free to dig a well in my backyard. No one is putting a lock on that kind of freedom.
They have the freedom to pollute the water, the air and the vast expanses of the Canadian Prairies with mining and oil residues. They have a firm grip on their freedoms. They have the freedom to exercise control to benefit the oil market, to raise prices. They have the freedom to concentrate communications businesses in order to send a message. We cannot put a lock on that. They concentrate businesses. They are good at that.
They have the freedom to speculate with the savings of small investors, without regulation or penalty. They gamble with our savings. They are free to do that.
They have the freedom to charge usurious interest rates of 20, 22, 23 per cent. There is nothing to it. Families are going into debt, young people in particular. They put them at the bottom of a well so they have to pay for 100 years. They have the freedom to avoid taxes.
We have nice little tax havens. We are free to go and put our money there. That is how we launder our money. It is fun. We make money. No one looks into that. Those are the freedoms they defend on the other side of the House. It is true. However, they do not respect the freedom of workers to organize, to negotiate. What about negotiating, exercising pressure or establishing a power relationship? No. We are talking about negotiations. All week long, I have heard the Minister of Labour say they negotiated for eight months. What kind of negotiations are we talking about? Negotiations designed to divide workers into two groups: one group for which they want to cut wages, undermine pensions and increase the retirement age. What are those false negotiations? False negotiations! You would think Canada Post Corporation was a bankrupt business asking its workers to make an effort to save the company. We know that workers, even unionized ones, often make those efforts. But we are talking about a business that makes a profit of about $281 million a year. It is not the case: Canada Post Corporation is not bankrupt.
To understand the offers made by Canada Post Corporation and, indirectly, the government, you have to understand that there is a political agenda behind this. The first item on that political agenda is to prove to everyone that the Conservatives will not make an issue of workers' rights. The second item is to prove that they are in power and that they are strong. It is true! One need only consider the ministers' condescending attitude in the past three weeks in their answers to the questions put to them. I am thinking of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who systematically repeats the same sentence to us. The Minister of Industry does the same thing when it comes to asbestos. They are not answering questions; their patting themselves on the back; and they are not meeting the expectations of the members of this House, not at all, any more than those of the public who would like to have answers to certain questions such as: What was done with the $50 million? How is it that no one has any documents on the matter regarding the decision-making processes that led to those investments? Those documents have simply disappeared.
The fundamental objective of the Conservative government's political agenda is to scuttle public services, to carve up the government, to make cuts to public services and, lastly—the ultimate objective—to privatize and eliminate government, contracting everything out to the market. It would be good if there was no more government and everything was private. That is the Conservative credo. We know that. We should privatize the hospitals, prisons, public services, police, water, the land, our land. In the collective psychosis of privatization, why not privatize the government itself, the government of the people? Let it be replaced by a board of directors! That would be a lot easier.
Some hon. members
Oh, oh!
Pierre Dionne Labelle NDP Rivière-du-Nord, QC
Let us remove the government and establish a vast board of directors made up of businessmen who will decide what is good for the people. That is the vision, the collective psychosis of the Conservatives, the reform ideal.
If you are engaging in social “desolidarization”, you will need a lot of locks. You would better buy locks! You will also need a lot of prisons. You will have to put a lot of officers on the border. We will not let the speculators, the usurers, the predators of the common good destroy the social and political progress of the last 100 years without reacting. No, it is out of the question!
The NDP members will stand up with workers and Canadians to defend something that cannot be locked up, put between four walls, fenced in, put behind barbed wire, something that you cannot leave at the border, something we cannot lock up. This thing that we will always stand up to defend is our freedom, our freedom of speech, our freedom of association, our freedom of organization, our freedom to get organized to live in a fairer society, enriched by all its members.
Harold Albrecht Conservative Kitchener—Conestoga, ON
Madam Speaker, it is unfortunate that in this debate the NDP continues to ignore the origin of this work stoppage.
It is clear that the rotating strikes had a negative impact on the volume of mail that was being delivered. Everybody who has ever had a business knows that they cannot continue to pay 100% of the expenses when they only have 50% of the income. It was an obvious fact that the work stoppages had led to a decrease in the volume of the mail. Canada Post locked them out, of course.
I have an email here that I just received in the last half hour from a constituent who says, “I just wanted to drop you a quick note of support on the Canada Post issue. Our company relies heavily on Canada Post and we are losing customers daily”.
What about the companies that are going to shut down? They are losing business, laying off workers and firing them. When is the party across the way going to start standing up for the working families of Canada?
Pierre Dionne Labelle NDP Rivière-du-Nord, QC
Madam Speaker, I would like to respond, just like the Minister of Foreign Affairs, by saying that the Auditor General made recommendations and that we are going to follow them, and that 32 projects benefited from these investments, and so on.
If someone asks me another question, this is what I am going to say.
Honestly, and to answer my colleague's question, I would be remiss if I did not point out that it is June 24, Quebec's national holiday. So I invite all the members to sing along: “Si j'avais les ailes d'un ange, je partirais pour Québec! Si j'avais des lumières sur mon bike...”
Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians ActGovernment Orders
St. Catharines Ontario
Conservative
Rick Dykstra ConservativeParliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration
Madam Speaker, I listened closely to the member's speech and I noted, on a number of occasions, that he used the words “lock” and “locked” as part of his way of expressing what has happened with respect to Canada Post. He also used the word “union”.
Back in St. Catharines, I have a union with the people of the community that sent me here to represent them. I take that union with them very seriously. I also know that every mailbox in the city of St. Catharines and in this country has a lock on it. I have 120,000 people in my community who deserve to get their mail on a daily basis, for whatever important reason it is.
The member opposite was just elected, and there are 100,000 locks on the mailboxes in—
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Madam Speaker, I want to raise one point. My colleague outlined the origins of the impasse here as being the ultimate goal of the government to privatize Canada Post as part of a neo-Conservative agenda that would include a multitude of changes; to recreate Canada in the image of George Bush's United States or Johnny Howard's Australia.
Are we seeing the first glimpse, the first insight, the first shot across the bow of the attack of the neo-Conservatives to throw some red meat to their base and finally do the things they were put here to do, which is to devastate the country as we know it, that our fathers built in the post—
The Deputy Speaker Denise Savoie
Order, please. The hon. member for Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup.