Mr. Chair, here we are dealing with yet another Conservative omnibus budget implementation act, and a very significant portion of this act includes changes to public service labour relations. You have to ask yourself what the heck does that have to do with the budget bill, and why would a labour relations bill be dealt with in our committee. It's once again problematic that so much is crammed into this one bill with very diverse content.
Later on we'll be dealing with appointments to the Supreme Court, and we've just dealt with a section on immigration. The ridiculousness of this is very frustrating.
These changes to the Public Service Labour Relations Act are very troubling, and I have to ask the government if they really want to prompt a deterioration of labour relations in the public sector. That's what's being provoked with these changes. I don't know, maybe the government thinks it's good politics to poke its finger in the eye of hard-working public sector workers, people who are paid with our tax dollars but who work very hard and do an excellent job on behalf of Canadians.
The government's belt-tightening has already seen the layoff of more than 20,000 public sector workers. Many are working very hard. We have heard a lot of complaints, whether it's from veterans, from seniors, from people trying to get access to EI, or from people concerned about cuts to search and rescue, services that have been cut and in some parts of the country are simply impossible for Canadians to get access to. These are public services. This is the work of the public sector and those are the jobs we are talking about.
This first change is about the definition of “essential service”. What the government is proposing with Bill C-4 is to give the minister sweeping powers to designate groups of workers as essential. That may sound like a good thing. We can all imagine essential workers. If your house is on fire, you don't want the firefighter to say, “I can't come right now because there is a labour issue that I'm dealing with”. There are some situations where it makes sense for there to be a designation of an essential service, but there is no definition provided here, or list of criteria that objectively one can point to, to say what would make some services essential and some not.
There is real concern that these powers will be used by the minister to designate groups of workers as essential, strictly for the purpose of undermining the ability of that bargaining unit to bargain collectively and defend their workers' rights. The definition of “essential service” that does appear seems to run contrary to the conventions of the ILO, the International Labour Organization.
This amendment would change the definition of “essential service” to reflect the definition from the ILO. The ILO provides an internationally recognized definition, and that's what is provided in this amendment.
We believe the important status of essential workers should be based on actual criteria rather than a loose definition that leaves the minister the power to designate people at will and strip them of their full collective bargaining rights. We think this is fundamentally undemocratic. It runs contrary to conventions that have been internationally agreed upon, and it is a dangerous slippery path that this government is going down.
It would give the minister incredible arbitrary powers, and as one of the witnesses said to us, it's like giving Coca-Cola, which is one of two parties in collective bargaining, in labour relations, the power to say that whole groups of employees in their workplace are designated essential and unable to exercise their full collective bargaining rights, their full labour rights, because it suits the employer, and it's convenient and perhaps advantageous for the employer. That is the power the minister is giving himself with these changes.
We think that's fundamentally wrong. We've had several labour experts testify here and tell us why that is wrong and why it's an affront to the practice of labour relations and to all of our experience in Canada and internationally.
On this particular clause, we're proposing an alternative, which is an agreed-upon international definition, which would give some clarity and some balance to the collective bargaining relationship, rather than really tipping the scales to the side of the employer, which in this case is the government.
Thank you.