Madam Speaker, today we gather to mourn the death of an old friend. We lament the demise of a principle that has guarded the integrity and quality of our public service for almost a century.
The rule of merit has produced a level of quality and impartiality in government that has served Canadians for generations. The merit principle directs that jobs and promotions go to the best qualified, most competent people.
The Liberals began to inch the principle of merit into an early grave a decade ago and Bill C-64 will bang the last few nails into its coffin.
No other principle can withstand the scrutiny of elementary justice. Who should the taxpayer hire? Who deserves a promotion? It is the best and the brightest of course. All Canadians from all groups accept this.
If the minister has his way, jobs and promotions will not necessarily go to the best and brightest, the ones who demonstrate these high qualifications. From the moment this bill is passed the public service will pass over many of the best qualified in favour of those with personal characteristics wholly unrelated to the job.
The government will subordinate the principle of merit to the politics of race and of gender. This is in a time of public service downsizing. The field of opportunity will narrow even further for those who stand outside the four designated groups.
Morale is already low. Morale will take a further blow in the next budget but it will sink through the floor with the passage of this act because thousands of civil servants will be denied a fulfilling career even if they deserve it more than their neighbour.
How do we know the members of a designated group? They are self-identified. This bill encourages a mentality of victimization. It encourages Canadians to view themselves as oppressed people who can gain something by viewing themselves as such.
At present two-thirds of Canada's workforce belong to a designated group. The annual report on the Employment Equity Act says that in 1991 almost 2.3 million Canadians reported having a disability, which would be okay, but it is an increase of 30 per cent from 1986.
This government will only be satisfied when all Canadians count themselves in as victims but not all Canadians buy into this mentality. I want to applaud the seven hundred and sixty some thousand Canadians who refuse to even name their ethnic origin in Canada's last census.
Even though "Canadian" was not given as an ethnic option in this census these seven hundred and some thousand refused to be part of a designated group and pencilled in the word Canadian. I digress.
Let us look at the purpose of the bill for a moment. Its purpose is to mandate a representative workforce. Exactly what is a representative workforce? The government ignores Canada's history and its social norms. It arbitrarily demands that the public service reflect-the word reflect means like a mirror-precisely by occupational group the designated groups as they occur in the larger Canadian workforce.
This is representation according to the bill. Is the workforce so unrepresentative that people are suffering injustice? Are Canadian employers so unfair that they would shut whole groups of people out of the labour market? Is there really a need for employment equity in Canada?
There is not when one looks at the numbers. Let me give members an example of the 570,000 people now regulated under the current Employment Equity Act. Women make up 45.6 per cent but the larger workforce is 45.9 per cent female. There is a .24 per cent difference there-what an injustice. Bring out the legislative hammer. The Liberals are on their high horses, hell bent on stamping out this perceived social evil. It is ridiculous. How does this mentality come about? The Liberal government is driven by special interest groups rather than public interest.
Allow me to quote from the Macdonald commission of 1985 which describes the formulation of section 15(2) of the equality rights section of the Constitution. This section empowers the government to deny equality to all Canadians and give preference to women, visible minorities, aboriginals and the disabled.
The commission said that the government incorporated verbatim the feminist proposal for rewriting the new equality rights section. Liberals have always been driven by political expediency rather than what is fair and equitable. This is another example.
Let us look at more numbers. What about the salaries of visible minorities? Visible minority males make 93 per cent of the salaries of all men in the workforce; visible minority women make 96 per cent of what the average woman makes. Ring the alarm bells. Roll out the legislative guns. We will blast this problem with a massive, coercive, manipulative bureaucracy. That is the Liberal way.
The government is suffering a nauseating attack of self-righteousness. It constantly points the finger of blame at ordinary Canadians, accusing them of unfairness and irresponsibility. What about the three million gun owners for example? No matter that they are responsible and law-abiding, they deserve tough legislation. The government assumes them to be irresponsible, suspicious, maybe even dangerous.
If the workplace is not precisely representative down to the last decimal point, the government aims its legislative guns. According to the Liberal government Canadian employers cannot be trusted to be fair to their workers. The government must regulate them more with some heavy-handed laws.
In fact Canadian employers are fair and the numbers show it. When situations of equal choice are compared, when we compare apples to apples, there is no discrimination. According to Statistics Canada, for example in 1992, single women made 99 per cent of the salaries of single men. Other salary differences can be explained by lifestyle choices and choices that prefer family over career. This is not a matter of injustice. It is a matter of personal priority and social norms.
What is the Reform answer? The market, not the government, should regulate the makeup of the workplace. Having a representative work force simply makes good business sense. Companies which do not hire the most productive people, companies that do not hire people that reflect their own markets, will be driven out of the market, and so be it. The market will impose its own discipline on the workplace in the private sector.
What is the role of government in the public sector? The government's role is to ensure equality of opportunity for all Canadians, to dismantle systemic barriers, help with education and make sure that employment information is available, reasonably accommodate for disabilities and make employment testing fair for everybody.
Equality of opportunity ensures that everybody has an equal chance. It creates a level playing field, not a field that is tilted in favour of special interest groups. No legislation is required, no bureaucracy, minimal expense, and no coercive quotas.
I want to address quotas in the context of Bill C-64. Quotas are requirements for hiring certain numbers of designated people within certain time frames. The legislation specifically disavows quotas by name in section 31, but on the other hand it imposes all the elements of quotas in other sections.
The bill sets up quotas in disguise. Let me describe them to you. First, the employer must audit the entire workforce, then establish a timetable for correcting any unrepresentativeness with so-called numerical goals for hiring, both short term and long term, then submit a report by June 1 of every year to the government. The employer is forced by law to consult with the union when it makes its plan.
The plan must include steps that will make reasonable progress toward these goals, and the word reasonable is of course defined by the government body in charge. What is the defining enforcement body? None other than the Canadian Human Rights Commission, that group of new moral crusaders, the witch hunters of political correctness. The act creates a new big brother, compliance auditors, to go over the employers' plans and reports.
If the compliance auditors at the commission do not like the plan, the steps, the goals, the auditor can do a compliance audit. He can walk into the business at any time and demand any confidential documents. The bill even specifies that he can use the employer's photocopier to copy them. Then the auditor gives a summary order to the employer to change his plans.
If numerical goals are not quotas I will eat my hat. If the employer does not like it he can go to a new creation of the act, another one, an even bigger brother, an employment equity review tribunal which can be made up of just one person, a tribunal of one person, but possess all the powers of any other quasi-judicial body in Canada. Its orders have the power of the Federal Court and if the employer does not like what the tribunal says he must appeal to the Appeals Court of Canada. This is nonsense.
The fines attached to this bill are absolutely punitive; $10,000 for the first offence and $50,000 for each one thereafter. All of the elements of quotas are there: the plans, the reporting and specific timetables, the investigations and the sanctions. Last night the human rights commissioner said jokingly: "We hope to be able to get compliance without using handcuffs and billy clubs". That is a nice, perverse joke but Canadians will not find it very funny.
My last point is this. What is the cost of this boondoggle? In the United States where quotas were created in 1970 the cost of affirmative action was estimated at 4 per cent of the GDP, $112 billion U.S. a year. In Canada there are no clear estimates but the Ontario Chamber of Commerce estimates that a company with 500 employees will spend $100,000 just to comply with the paperwork.
This bill is utterly offensive.