Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise to speak to this bill today.
However, before I do, I noticed that a number of members in this House have been talking about how much we respect the RCMP and value their service. I would like to point out one very special member of the RCMP in my own riding of Burnaby South, Chief Superintendent Dave Critchley. He is the officer in charge of the Burnaby RCMP detachment. I would like to thank him for his service to our community, because Chief Superintendent Critchley has informed me that he is retiring this year. All of us are going to miss him very much. I wish him and his wife Debra all the best.
It is worth going through a short bit of Chief Superintendent Critchley's career. He has spent 33 years in the RCMP, which included a posting here in Ottawa. He was seconded to the Privy Council Office as the RCMP federal liaison for the winter Olympics. We all thank him for the great job he did there on what was a spectacular event. Not to stop there, he was also posted to Kabul, in Afghanistan, as the Canadian police commander. He was the senior Canadian police officer in Afghanistan. He has done fantastic work, and I would like to thank him again for his service and for being so kind to me during my time as a member of Parliament in Burnaby.
I will move from the niceties of being able to stand in the House to thank people, to the unpleasantries. This is a general comment on the government and its seeming inability to get bills passed through this place, and of course the other place, the Senate. I have been here since 2011, and although I did not agree with many of the Conservatives' bills, I did agree with their professionalism. I think that the Conservatives did a good job in letting us know what bills would be put forward, and they did them in an orderly way in this House.
I find that the current Liberal government seems totally incapable of getting things passed. This is not because there is filibustering. It is not because there is any lack of work on our behalf. They seem confused. We look at the parliamentary website. We heard about 100 days of action. We heard about real change. Out of the 16 government bills that have been put forward here, only one has made it through the Senate, besides the three that were for budget spending. Of the things besides money that the Liberal government seem to care about, it seems incapable of getting them through this place, and who knows what is going to happen in the Senate? The Liberals have created complete chaos over there, and we are all waiting to see what happens.
This bill, again, is an example of incompetence on that side of the House. We all know what the Supreme Court has ordered. We have various points that we do not agree with in this bill, but the Supreme Court has struck down a law. It said that the RCMP is allowed to form a union or some kind of association, and the government on that side is playing politics. The bill that was put forward here is not robust enough, from our perspective.
I do not have a huge union background. I have been in faculty associations at universities. At Simon Fraser University, we have just been fully unionized. However, this is not something that I am that familiar with. I am proud to say that our political party is the only party that has a collective agreement with our employees, and we dutifully uphold it. I see the benefit of being an employer with a properly structured collective agreement. Therefore, when I read that the exclusions from this bill included discussions of staffing, employment, harassment, and discipline, it made me think that this is a hollow attempt to abide by the Supreme Court's decision that the members of the RCMP have the right to organize collectively. I do not agree with my colleagues on the Conservative side that some kind of secret ballot is needed; just sign a union card or association card and one is a member.
However, it seems strange that the government would restrict so many things from this discussion between employer and employee, for instance, that they cannot agree upon staffing levels. As my hon. colleague from Esquimalt said earlier, employers and employees should have a discussion about how many RCMP members would be in a car in an evening shift. There should be discussion and then agreement on what is appropriate.
I was fortunate enough to sit on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights when the harassment issues were happening in the RCMP and finally came to light. These types of things have burdened the RCMP in the past. They have been one of the only marks against a very fine record and have caused numerous lawsuits and problems. Of course, that is something that should be negotiated through a collective agreement, and discipline too, to make sure that what is happening is fair to the members.
Although I have worked in a unionized environment, I was not familiar with the workings of that environment. Now, being an employer with unionized employees, I see how important that is. What unionization and collective agreements allow for is a discussion of these important issues. There are a lot of times as an employer that we do not understand or realize the perspective of the person hired and the constraints that they are under. Abiding by a collective agreement is a way to foster discussion within an organization.
The other huge advantage as an employer in a non-unionized environment, which I have worked in plenty of, is that the employer is the person overseeing the operations of the organization and is the enforcer of the work, the monitor of the quality of work. However, when a union is brought into a situation, there is almost a double monitoring. There is the regular management that sets the course of work and the direction of the organization, but there is also the union, which makes sure that union employees are protected and that they are working collectively toward the goals of the organization. That can only help to enhance any workplace. Again, not being familiar through most of my life with unions and how they operate, and now being very familiar with them, I see this only as a benefit to the RCMP.
The bill is a long time coming. Earlier today, I had the pleasure of seeing Svend Robinson, the very famous former MP from a number of Burnaby ridings with a lot of different names. He brought in the first bill to the House, in either the late seventies or early eighties, to allow the RCMP to organize. We have had the Supreme Court finally say that the laws that are on the books right now are not appropriate. They do not jibe with the Constitution and have been struck down. Now Parliament has an obligation, if we are going to put restrictions on the RCMP and their collective organizing, that it abides by the conditions laid out.
I am disappointed, in two ways. I am disappointed with the government side of the House and the way it has mishandled the flow of legislation through this place. Despite all the talk about consultation and working together that we hear from the Minister of Democratic Institutions daily, the Liberals are not listening. That is a problem. It is trying to railroad things through. While the Conservatives were quite good at railroading things through the House of Commons, I cannot say that is happening on the other side. That speaks to a level of competence that the Liberal government has not yet developed, which is distressing to Canadians. We are going to hit our June break, go back for barbeques, work with constituents, and there is hardly going to have been anything done here. It is because the Liberals are not listening, and that is a huge problem.
There is the larger problem of process in this place with the government not being able to get things through. There is also the problem in the bill, which is too restrictive. It should be altered to allow the union and the employer to negotiate things like staffing, deployment, harassment, and discipline.
