Ladies and gentlemen members of the committee, good morning. Thank you for having invited us to appear before you this morning, in the company of my colleagues from the Public Service Alliance of Canada and the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada.
The Canadian Association of Professional Employees, or CAPE, represents over 10,000 economists, statisticians and policy analysts, and 925 government translators, interpreters and terminologists, as well as the Library of Parliament analysts and research assistants with whom you deal on a daily basis.
In CAPE's estimation, the changes affecting collective bargaining in Bill C-59 violate the freedom of association defined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This has been confirmed by the recent trilogy of Supreme Court of Canada decisions regarding labour rights. Bill C-59 is not an isolated gesture. It is part of a concerted strategy to change the rules of collective bargaining.
Bill C-4, passed in December 2013, had already amended our members' negotiating process by withdrawing their right to arbitration. This forces our members toward a single outcome, that of conciliation or strike. Through Bill C-59, the government now wants to exclude major issues from legitimate collective bargaining, a right that has been recognized by the Supreme Court; this shows contempt for the law and for the contracts that have already been signed between the two parties. It is as though you had signed a contract to purchase a house, and three years later, the former owner came back to take away the storage shed.
In addition to denying their fundamental rights, the government is proposing an approach that is unfair to the employees, and unjust to taxpayers. Indeed, the government claims that it will be saving money, on the basis of what is in fact an accounting liability. It says nothing about the cost of the new compensation system. In order to demonstrate the impact of a change that would take the number of annual leave days from 15 to 6, we have used the information provided by the employer. We analyzed the use of sick leave days according to duration and incidence. Our conclusion is that what has been presented at the negotiating table as an improvement would in fact be a marked deterioration for a vast number of employees, especially for the most vulnerable among them.
Every year, 60% of public service employees must take more than six days of sick leave, according to the data provided by Treasury Board, in the table contained in the written brief you have in hand.
Under the regime proposed by the government, less than 15% of them would see salary replacement through the short-term disability insurance plan that is being proposed. As Mr. Lee just mentioned, the waiting period is a particular problem. Almost half of these people would receive no benefits whatsoever under the new regime as it stands.
I would like to present a realistic scenario. I'm the mother of three children and not an old baby boomer—sorry Mr. Lee—and I can tell you that in the early days, when my kids were in day care, I would catch everything, and six days go by really fast. So a normal public service employee, 33 years old, who catches pneumonia after having used up her six days of sick leave would have to make the tough choice between coming to work sick to avoid losing income and staying at home without pay. If she chooses the former, she risks spreading her infection to her colleagues, creating a further burden on our public health system. Not only are such indirect costs not accounted for in the budget, but the price tag of putting the privately run, short-term disability plan in place is also very conveniently not estimated in the budget.
On the other hand, the finance minister books $900 million in savings. While this figure is not a projected expenditure; rather, it represents the book value of accrued sick leave. Savings cannot be realized out of non-expenditures, and I have a lot of economists to back me up on that.
We know from the Parliamentary Budget Officer's analysis that the existing system costs very little, because the vast majority of employees on sick leave are not replaced during their absence from work. So we contend that the taxpayers will also be losers from this bad plan. It's likely to be more costly to manage than the current sick leave regime.
In conclusion, I think that the House of Commons is the keeper of the rights and freedoms of Canadian citizens. Public service employees are also citizens, and they should benefit from the same rights as other Canadians.
Bill C-59 is an illegal and unconstitutional attack on those rights.
This government contends that it is simply trying to modernize its employees' sick leave plan. If that's its goal, we're on board, and we can reach that without Bill C-59, without bypassing free and fair collective bargaining, and without changing the rules of the game after the fact.
Thank you very much.