Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to this bill on employment equity, a concept with which I have no problem. We still need in our society, however enlightened it might tend to be, some recognition that not all aspects of our society are as accepting of visible minorities, aboriginals, females, people with handicaps in the workplace or in our society as is generally perceived to be most appropriate.
I have no objection in society attempting to use the law as is being proposed in the equity bill to force this sort of compliance to avoid discrimination for any of the reasons this proposal lists.
I am therefore basically in support of the idea of employment equity and the requirement that employers give equal opportunity for all people regardless of the circumstances of their birth or what life may have imposed on them by way of disability after birth.
However, the bill has not done a good job of looking at the global economy of the new world order we are now living in, which has presented a much different form of employment than what this bill and what most of the legislation that governments have put together deal with. These kinds of bills and laws function on an employer-employee relationship. They are virtually toothless when it comes to a new world where more and more people are self-employed, where contracting, subcontracting and subcontracting the subcontracting goes on, so there are three, four and five levels of contract.
As a consequence of that new practice it is virtually impossible to supply the kind of protection this bill proposes to do. If members do not believe me they should walk outside of the doors of this House. There is a program going on, the Peace Tower project, in which we have seen the most blatant treatment of an employee because she was female. The House, on whose territory this injustice took place, appears to be unable or unwilling to do anything about it. It is under the aegis of the Speaker but he seems unable to do anything. The job was contracted by the minister of public works who cannot find 10 minutes of time to even discuss it with me and whose officials actually aided the ejection of this woman and her fellow workers from the site. They had to leave their tools which they cannot recover.
The several times they have attempted to recover the tools employees of Public Works and Government Services Canada have told them that they are disrupting the building site and that they cannot have their tools because the current contractor is using them to complete the job. The contractor forced them to leave the job site because they insisted on using a female engineer.
If we are going to be believable in this Chamber in trying to deal with questions of inequality in the workplace we are going to have to recognize that very often in this new world order the workplace is run by people who have subcontracted and subcontracted those contracts to the point that it is impossible to hold the employer who makes those kinds of decisions, however arbitrary, unfair and normally illegal, responsible. We cannot do anything about it.
As a consequence, the subcontractor has forced the building trades people, the masons who were working on the Peace Tower, off the job because they persisted in using a female engineer. He had no objection to her work. He was only objecting because she was female. He made that quite clear. He forced them off the job. They left their tools and they cannot recover them. They can go to court. They have due process. I have talked to members on the government side who have said: "Use due process, that is what you have to do".
Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, you are aware that due process in this case is almost useless because her employer, the mason that hired her to be the engineer for his part of the project, is not the person who is forcing her off the site but the subcontractor above him. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has some trouble dealing with this.
Others have advised me. Others of the legal profession from the government side have said: "Look to the federal human rights commissioner. He is obviously the one who has to do this because it is on a federal site and it is for the federal houses of Parliament for Pete's sake". Again the person that has pushed her off the site is not her employer and there seems to be nothing that the human rights commissioner can do in the case of this injustice.
I raised this briefly at second reading and I remind members on all sides that if this kind of injustice is to be permitted on our own grounds literally and figuratively and we can do nothing about it, what is the point of replicating the same type of legislation using the same requirements only on employers versus employees without taking into account the contractors and the subcontractors and all the other permutations that occur in business?
What are we really accomplishing? We are accomplishing very little except perhaps to make the whole process and the whole political group of us in the House look rather silly.
I keep preaching from my far corner. Very few people are in the House when I do my little rant on these things, but I hope the new ears hearing this each time take this to the rest of their colleagues and see if there is some way we can force compliance if not across the country at least on the acres of yard in front of the House.
This is a great injustice and makes the whole process of attempting to get employment equity to permit females equal access to jobs as engineers or scientists or doctors or lawyers. It makes the whole process of the last 15 or 20 years look absolutely ridiculous.
This woman is apparently considering going back to washing dishes because that is the only employment she can find at the moment. She had a job as an engineer. The subcontractor hiring her firm to work on the Peace Tower forced it off the job because it persisted in employing a woman engineer.
For his efforts that subcontractor was rewarded with a further subcontract to work on the whole House of Commons instead of just the Peace Tower after he engaged in this process.
I cannot let any debate or any discussion of an equity employment bill go by without reminding members of the House, and I hope some of the frontbenchers will take this to heart, that we have allowed a grave injustice just outside our doors. If any of the laws we pass in this place are to be taken seriously by people outside of Ottawa, we should be able to enforce what we have already made law numerous years ago when work gets done on our buildings on the confines of Parliament Hill.
Until that happens I am afraid I will look sceptically at this new effort at achieving employment equity.