Welcome minister. Thank you very much for coming this morning to talk to us about your vision of the anti-strike breaker bill.
On November 5, 1990 you were a Conservative member of Parliament for the same riding you represent now, and you voted in the House in favour of a bill tabled by one of your colleagues at that time, the member for Bas-Richelieu—Nicolet—Bécancour, Mr. Louis Plamondon.
Your decision to support the bill was certainly not based on statistics, because Quebec's statistics show that in 1989, 6.9% of the person-days lost were by employees under federal jurisdiction. For statistics on the duration of disputes in terms of the number of days lost, you cannot put employees under federal jurisdiction being put in the same basket as those under provincial jurisdiction. Distinctions must be made.
Nor can we calculate the frequency, because labour disputes may last a day, a half a day, or perhaps three shifts. The real statistic is the number of person-days lost. Comparisons must be made within the same province between employees under federal jurisdiction and employees under provincial jurisdiction.
The Quebec government's statistics show that for certain years they are not very impressive. I will give 2002 as an example. In Quebec, workers under federal jurisdiction represented approximately 6% to 8% of the workforce. In 2002, 47.8% of the person-days lost were by employees under federal jurisdiction. That figure is a far cry from their 6% or 7%.
There have been better years, it is true: 14.2%, 8% and even 1.6% in a given year. However, the averages of the two charts that can be found on the Quebec government website are 12.2% and 18% respectively, from 1995 to 2004; but there are also years showing averages of 47%.
Minister, these are real statistics that must be taken into consideration.
I will make two comments and let you react to them.
The balance you are talking about is the employers' balance. The Sims report that you quoted did indeed result in an amendment to the Canada Labour Code aiming at authorizing the use of replacement workers. However, Mr. Rodrigue Blouin wrote a dissenting report on replacement workers. We are not talking about just anyone here: he is a great intellectual from Quebec and a professor at Laval University. His whole study is based on the fact that replacement workers upset the balance of power between the employer and the employee.
Replacement workers are intruders in a dispute that concerns two parties: the employer and the employees. These intruders always shift the balance of power in favour of the employer, and never, absolutely never, in favour of the employee.
And yet, the anti-strike breaker legislation that has been in effect in Quebec for 30 years, since 1977, forcefully demonstrates to what degree union peace can be achieved and this balance respected. In fact, in Quebec over the last few years, the long, painful and difficult strikes always involve businesses under federal jurisdiction. There was the Videotron employees strike; the Radio Nord Communications strike that lasted 22 months; the Cargill strike that lasted 36 months. There was even a strike, at CHNC, a radio station in Bonaventure, that lasted three years. And what did the 12 replacement workers do, after two years? They asked for their union certification.
This clearly shows that not only are replacement workers intruders as far as the balance of employer-employee negotiations is concerned, but also that they are workers unlike the others, since they were refused their union certification.