Human Resources Committee on May 2nd, 2016

[Daniel Therrien]

My role is to advise parliamentarians on the consequences that legislative measures can have on privacy. I do not have an opinion on the activities of labour organizations, specifically, but, like my predecessor, I have maintained all along that the provisions contained in Bill C-377 and its previous incarnations, went too far by imposing a public disclosure requirement. They were unreasonable and infringed on privacy rights.

[Yves Robillard, Liberal, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Are you, as the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, concerned by the fact that Bill C-377 requires labour organizations and labour trusts to disclose certain information to the Minister of National Revenue?

If so, would you mind describing those concerns for us?

[Daniel Therrien]

I talked about them during my opening remarks.

Bill C-377 requires labour organizations to disclose information that is considered to be among the most sensitive—information on the political activities of union members. A person's political activities, including those of a union member, clearly constitutes very sensitive information. The reasons for disclosing such information publicly have to be compelling and the necessity to do so must be justified. In our view, the bills did not set out proper justification for requiring labour organizations and their executives to disclose their political activities or views. That is, by far, the most sensitive type of information.

The bill also required the disclosure of certain financial information, including wages and salaries, and contracts over a certain amount, as my colleague from the Canadian Bar Association pointed out earlier. The main issue was the requirement imposed on union executives to disclose their political activities.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

[Yves Robillard, Liberal, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

I could share the rest of my time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

You have no more time, so there you go. You're being very selfish today. Fantastic.

Madam Benson, go ahead, please.

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

I want to build on what I would call a bit of rhetoric around the sanctity of the secret ballot. I think the issue is more often the fact that it's a mandatory vote. We heard previously at this committee from both Dr. Slinn and Professor Logan that both in the United States and in Canada the under the mandatory vote system, employers are notified, and it allows employers time in order to access employees and also intimidate them, which is the case according to what we found in the research.

We were even aware of some research the previous government did that wasn't released, and so I think it's a bit of a red herring to talk about the secret vote.

The point is that with a mandatory vote that notifies employers, we know that people don't get representation from unions because of intimidation from employers.

Mr. Yussuff, I wonder if you want to expand on that a little bit.

[Hassan Yussuff]

In the federal jurisdiction we have had card certification for many decades, and it has proven, of course, to be a clear way for workers to indicate whether or not they want to belong to a union.

If the board is uncertain about whether or not there is support for a union, the board itself can order a vote. Of course, on many occasions when there has been a vote, the board has found that employers have truly interfered with the workers' ability to choose the union. At the provincial level where a vote is the only form of indication to join a union, the evidence has been quite clear. Never mind my saying it; that's what the academic research has told us, that it clearly allows the employer to interfere with the right of workers to join that union. The situation is similar in the United States.

Why would an employer care if the workers want to join the union? If it's their free democratic and constitutional right in this country, why would employers want to interfere in it other than the fact that if you do have a vote, it gives the employer time to use all kinds of tactics during the time the vote has been ordered? I could list some of the companies that clearly said they were going to close the facility, or cut people's salaries, or lay people off. Of course, ultimately it changed the workers' ability to truly exercise their free choice.

The evidence is there. Within the federal jurisdiction, it has worked very successfully. Again, the bigger question is that other than for ideological reasons, we don't know why this private member's bill was brought forward in the first place.

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

I'll move to Mr. Mazzuca.

We heard previous testimony as well—and maybe this is more a question for the Privacy Commissioner—about some of the commercial privacy concerns of those employers involved in the tendering processes, whereby their involvement in labour trusts and training programs would be revealed.

I wondered if anyone can comment regarding commercial privacy concerns and not wanting to have them revealed to your competitor in a tendering process. Employers and private employers shared with us that that was a huge concern.

[Michael Mazzuca]

Given the detailed type of disclosure that Bill C-377 would require, certainly a lot of commercial and possibly commercially sensitive information would have been disclosed on a public website. Service providers to trade unions and probably more so to the so-called labour trusts would have had to think twice before entering into those kinds of commercial transactions if they knew that things such as their billing process, their billing amounts, and hourly rates would all be publicly disclosed.

Because of the way Bill C-377 was drafted, and in particular because of its definition of labour trusts, there was concern about it going well beyond the labour movement. It would have encompassed anybody who did work with union members.

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you. That's my time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Over to Mr. Sangha.

[Ramesh Sangha, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Mr. Yussuff, you have mentioned that Bills C-377 and 525 were not meeting the requirements that are supposed to be in the labour law. What are your major concerns and why do unions feel they were not able to work properly under Bills C-525 and C-377?

[Hassan Yussuff]

I think that throughout the history of the federal labour code—for quite some time in any case—we've had a fairly balanced system. It's not perfect. It has some flaws, and we can do much to improve it. The reality is that every time the code has been amended, whether it's Labour Code part 1 or part 2, much care has been taken to ensure that the right balance is found in improving the code, recognizing that being under the code is one of the greatest protections that workers have.

What these two private members' bills did was to tilt the balance in the opposite direction for unjustified reasons. There was never a clearly stated reason as to what the objectives of these bills were, other than by the two authors of these bills who said, “here's the stated goal”. In one case, on Bill C-525, the member said it was because of “a mountain of evidence” of union intimidation of workers wanting to join unions. The CIRB, the authoritative body that came before the committee to testify, said there was no such mountain of evidence.

On Bill C-377, I don't know what they were trying to solve. This legislation was essentially copied from the United States without any regard to our constitutional structures in this country or without being introduced into law. Former Conservative senator Hugh Segal said Bill C- 377 was nothing more than a witch hunt against unions in this country. The members on the government side at that time saw no reason to pause and reflect on what they were doing in tabling the legislation. The only thing I have to say to you is that this was ideologically driven legislation trying to undermine unions in this country, and it had no clear policy objectives from my perspective.

[Ramesh Sangha, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

You are expert people sitting here and giving your expert and valuable opinions. We heard Mr. Mazzuca saying that Bills C-377 and C-525 were against the Constitution and against freedom of expression and freedom of association. What are your opinions regarding that? Are all unions diminished in size, or are unions not able to work properly? How are the freedom of expression and the freedom of association affected? Do you have some opinions on that?

[Hassan Yussuff]

Clearly, in the context of Bill C-377, in addition to the privacy concerns listed by the Privacy Commissioner, we realized that this bill was going to require us to reveal all kinds of information that no jurisdiction in this country has ever had to in terms of law, except the jurisdiction that came forward with this. More importantly, from our perspective, this bill overreaches into the provincial territory, which is a violation of the Constitution. The Constitution recognizes the provinces' prerogative to regulate labour relations within their jurisdictions. This bill overreaches and uses the Income Tax Act to do it, of all things, in the first place. For many of our organizations, under the federal labour code, if members require financial information from their union and the union refuses to provide that information, they can ask the board to force the union to disclose that information. There have been few, or next to no, cases listed by the board where a union has refused to comply with the requirement of an order issued by the board. That's currently in the current federal labour code. In regard to Bill C-525, we saw this as a bill that had more to do with ensuring that union growth in this country would remain stagnant at a federal level. It would deliberately ensure that workers would have more difficulty in getting their unions certified, because the bill provides ample opportunity for third parties and employers to interfere with that delicate process.

We have always said that if a worker doesn't want to join a union, they don't have to sign a union card. If a majority of workers within a workplace don't want to have their union continue to represent them, they can simply file an application before the Canada Labour Relations Board and a union can lose its rights to represent those workers. Not once during this process did the members on the government side demonstrate that the current system was was flawed. It was amended through a thorough examination led by the Sims task force. Both the CLC at the time and FETCO, the federal employees group, were highly involved in that and were consulted before the law was changed back in the 1990s.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

Mr. Long, you're up next.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

My questions were for Mr. Mortimer, but he's not here yet. He's in the second round.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

We're in the second round of the first panel.

Do you want to confer for a moment?

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Yes, just for a minute.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Do you want to share your time with Mr. Ruimy? He seems eager to go.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Mr. Ruimy.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, I don't know if this is a place to challenge each other. I think it's right that we have the witnesses who are supposed to be speaking to that testimony and not to each other's.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Fair enough. Absolutely.