Transport Committee on May 7th, 2013

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You have almost two minutes.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

I'll take one, then there might be some time left.

In the union that Mr. Sullivan was talking about, Local 183—a construction union—they offered dental, vision and medical care for their workers. A lot of their workers are Portuguese or Hispanic and Italian. This kind of wrap-around service really assists them, and they also have apprenticeship and training programs so that the younger generation can learn the skills. Skills training is very important and we need a lot more apprenticeship programs.

In my reading of it there are far more benefits, whether for vision care, dental or medical benefits, in unionized shops. Do you have any statistics to show that companies that don't have unions also have extensive training programs, medical packages, dental care and so on for their workers?

[John Mortimer]

I do not have any specific studies on that point. What I do know from an acquaintance of mine who was recently over at the Local 183 hall is that 50% of the people there aren't working. A job is a great thing. There's something wrong when 50% of your people aren't working and there are jobs going wanting in the rest of this country. If you subsidize those people with preferential employment insurance, they're going to stay there in Toronto, it appears, and they're not going to Saskatoon where I was on a job site that was crying out for workers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You are out of time.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Poilievre, on a point of order.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Mr. Sullivan raised an example of a work-site safety issue, which I think was in his riding. I wonder if he could table some information on it so we could include it in our conversation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I guess it was something to do with a stage collapse.

[A voice]

Yes, I can. It's still in the courts.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Adler, five minutes.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank Mr. Mortimer for being here today. I want to pursue a line of questioning that has to do with basic economics. As we learn in Economics 101, we all know that the definition of economics is the allocation of scarce resources.

In government we are elected to make decisions. In the course of our decision-making processes, we are asked to pass legislation and implement certain policies and regulations and so forth. With that goes budgeting, so we're allocating moneys to various envelopes.

Now, given the state of our country's infrastructure, would it not be a better allocation of resources to identify where government could most efficiently put its allotment of scarce resources to get the most value for its dollar, because at the end of the day there's only one taxpayer? Does that not make good economic sense?

[John Mortimer]

Yes.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

I'm a bit confused here, because what you're advocating is really freedom of choice. You're not advocating that non-unionized workers should take preference over the unionized workers.

What you're saying is that the taxpayer, of whom there is only one, should get the best return on his or her investment, meaning on the payment of their taxes. For a return on their investment, which we're all interested in—Mr. Coderre, indeed, said earlier that he cared very deeply about his wallet—does it not make sense that a government would invest the hard-earned money that taxpayers pay to the government every April 30, and every day through the HST and a variety of other taxes, to the benefit the people of the country, more than that of a very small minority, i.e., through the requirement to use unionized labour?

Again, I'm simply trying to figure out here basic common sense. Is that not—

[John Mortimer]

Absolutely. If there's more competition and there are more eligible people to participate, if unions and those contractors face more competition, I believe they would work hard to find better ways to get better results, so that they could get those jobs.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

I remember reading—I guess it was about 20 years ago now—Milton Friedman's book Free to Choose. He said that the best way to discipline a monopoly or a business is to create competition.

As politicians, we all know how we respond to competition. We fight elections, so we're all aware that competition makes us want to achieve more and to better candidates than the people we're running against. To my mind, competition just makes common sense here. As I said earlier, given the state of our country's infrastructure and the infrastructure deficit many are talking about, it would seem to me that hard-earned taxpayers' money would be much better used in a competitive environment.

[John Mortimer]

I agree.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Am I on the right track here or am I missing something?

[John Mortimer]

You’re absolutely on the right track.

I think that the unionized contractors will be challenged by that competition in the way that they're not in any environment where they're not having to compete.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Once again, just to make the point, you're not saying that unionized workers are to be excluded. There's no preference for one over the other here.

[John Mortimer]

The rate of union density is declining all over the world because workers don't want to be unionized to the same degree as they used to. Look at Scandinavia: the rate at which young people in Denmark and Sweden are becoming union members is in a precipitous free-fall. The rate has gone from the eighties to the fifties, percentage wise. It’s a big change, and there are a lot of reasons for that, including the change in the legal landscape, the change in people's attitudes. But in countries like ours, where union leaders focus a significant portion of their time on all sorts of activities other than in the workplace, I'm not surprised that complaints against union leaders are the number-one filing before labour boards.

I'm not surprised that the Canadian Labour Congress's own survey research says that satisfaction levels with union leaders is in double-digit decline.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay.

Mr. Watson, go ahead for five minutes.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to Mr. Mortimer for appearing today.

I want to focus on closed tendering for a moment. Is closed tendering largely a municipal policy, in your understanding of it?

[John Mortimer]

Certainly, municipal ones are what I'm most familiar with, from reading some of the different schemes and seeing them take place. But a lot of them exist under provincial legislative schemes, and they're provincially funded as well. The question is, how much actual, pure, 100% provincial infrastructure is there?

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Right.

In fact, Mr. Oakey, from Merit Canada, who testified recently before our committee, was able to substantiate that this is a fairly widespread situation throughout Canada.

I’ll follow up on my colleague, Mr. Harris's question on MERFs. The acronym MERF is market enhancement recovery fund, and STABs are stabilization funds, sometimes also called JTFs, job targeting funds.

In Alberta's case, since the 2008 reforms to MERFs came in, they're now called, interestingly enough, membership development funds, but they have the same function.

Are these funds used in situations of open tendering, where unionized work is competing against non-unionized work for contracts?

[John Mortimer]

That's my understanding, yes.