Madam Speaker, in rising to speak to Bill C-76, the budget implementation act, I want to make it clear from the outset that the Reform Party will oppose this bill as a whole.
This bill in some ways is like Bill C-68, the gun control legislation in that it is a bill with more than one part. Some of it is wholly unacceptable, but other parts with some minor changes would be acceptable to the Reform Party of Canada and to me.
Reform currently has a motion before the House to separate the gun control bill into two parts so that we could examine each main idea on its own merits. I wish we could do that with this bill as well. Bill C-76 is an omnibus bill dealing with more than one subject at once. There are public service issues. There are transportation and federal-provincial transfer issues and so on.
Since I am fortunate enough to be critic for renewal in the public service, we have examined the areas which deal with the public service. I have found some things I like and some things I do not like one bit. I am here to say what we like and what we do not like about the public service portion of this bill. I want to expose some very serious shortcomings indeed.
I want to go through the first 10 clauses of the bill. I will give my comments on each of the important clauses and then draw some conclusions from what we have found.
Section 39 of the Public Service Employment Act allows public servants who work in a minister's office for more than three years to bump other public servants, to be appointed in essence without competition. This is unfair in some cases. I am pleased to report that public servants declared surplus will not
be able to be bumped by the staff of the ministers. Those declared surplus in this act will move to the top of the priority list for job offers. That is a fair and reasonable thing to do.
I have been disturbed by other parts of the act. Allow me to quote from a letter written by the President of the Treasury Board to the Professional Institute of the Public Service last July. He was writing about the work force adjustment directive which is an umbrella agreement between Treasury Board and the unions that represent indeterminate or regular full time employees of the Government of Canada.
Members opposite should listen very closely to what the President of the Treasury Board wrote on July 22, 1994: "This government has stated in the past and remains committed to the principle that the employment protection provisions in the work force adjustment directive will only be changed through negotiations".
To me this promise does not speak of unilateral action; it speaks of a process of consensus. What is the main purpose of the first 10 clauses of Bill C-76? The main object is to break a promise. This bill unilaterally without negotiation changes the provisions of the directive.
The government tried to negotiate. It took a long time but not all unions would agree to change the directive. Therefore the government went ahead and broke its promise. Why is this little broken promise so important? I will be glad to tell you why this is so important and every public servant in the federal government should be listening right now.
The government made all sorts of promises during the last election campaign. The Ottawa Citizen reported a few days ago the contents of a brochure sent out during the campaign under the name of a man who today is the minister for renewal in the public service.
The brochure read: "Public servants, enough is enough. The Conservatives have used public servants as scapegoats and treated them with contempt. I pledge to protect public servants against job loss". He is the minister who is sitting in the House now. That is another wonderful promise from the government, but today that promise lies in shreds along with 45,000 public service jobs.
It is ironic that the Liberals in the last election campaign tried to stir up fear among the public servants about what the Reform Party might do to their job security in the days ahead. Many of them put their trust in the Liberal Party, hoping that nothing would be changed, that the words of the minister would hold true. The Liberals were happy, of course, to promise the moon as long as they could get the public service vote.
The President of the Treasury Board was happy to promise that the workforce adjustment directive would only be changed through negotiation. It was easy to promise that. If he was not sure he could deliver on that promise, he never should have made it in the first place. All public servants should beware Liberal promises. They have proven today with this bill that their promises are not worth the paper on which they are written.
As the financial situation of the government becomes more and more serious, more and more promises will have to be broken. In just two years the interest alone on the national debt will be $51 billion. Total program spending will be barely double that, just $108 billion. Social programs and the public service will be reduced to a shell because the Liberal government feels free to make promises but does not intend to lay the fiscal groundwork in order to be able to keep them.
This bears repeating. The threat to social programs and the threat to our public service does not come from fiscally conservative people such as myself. The threat to the public service and social programs comes from people who will not and do not have a plan to balance the budget and bring the deficit to zero. That is where the threat comes from and the budget does not address that.
Further to this concern, I want to say a word about fiscal responsibility. I received an anonymous letter today from a public servant who talks about the air navigation system of the Department of Transport. There are 6,600 employees in this part of the department and the public servant alleges in this letter: "Transport Canada employees expect to be terminated with full severance and cash out packages and immediately be offered the same jobs in a new commercialized air navigation services organization with no interruption. Some retiring people can be expected to be hired back on contract as they are now". That would be a real travesty.
We need assurances from the minister that this will not happen, that it will not be allowed to happen. The public servant who wrote this letter suggests that this boondoggle could cost the taxpayer in excess of $200 million.
We in the Reform Party of Canada will watch the Liberals. We will hold their feet to the fire to make sure that they are not going to merely transfer from the public service an equally expensive and maybe even a more expensive contracted service in another sector, just for the sake of saying they met a bottom line on the job count. That is something that must be watched because the key is fiscal responsibility and economic savings to the government. If it cannot show that, if it cannot prove that, then it should not be axing the jobs to begin with.
With tongue firmly in cheek, I would suggest perhaps that the Reform Party is not as sophisticated as the Liberal Party. The Reform Party sticks to the economic, bald faced facts and offers the unvarnished truth. It is not prepared to promise the world to the public service or to anyone else. Reformers are willing to face the situation as it is and be responsible with taxpayers' dollars. All we promise to do is to act immediately to preserve
what remains of our social programs and what remains of our public service over the long run.
Reform promised the opposite of the Liberals in the last campaign. We promised a smaller government. We promised spending cutbacks. Ironically, the cutbacks that the public service has experienced since the Liberals took power are already and will be in the long run far, far more than what the Reform Party promised under our zero in three plan of the last election.
If Reform had been elected government, the public service cutbacks would have been accomplished a year ago. We would be within one year of balancing our budget. All the worse would be behind us. Interest rates would be lower. Our economy would be growing by leaps and bounds. We would be in a good position to keep our most valuable social programs and the core of our civil service permanently intact. Because of Liberal inaction and because it took 18 months to get the first serious budget on to the table, all public servants will continue to suffer year after year. The government will continue to whittle away at the public service until it is reduced to a shell and no negotiated settlements, no agreements, no three-year suspensions, no promises will mean anything when that happens.
The government has set itself up for another promise. It has only suspended the workforce adjustment directive for three years. Conveniently, this is just beyond the next election. We know what kind of a carrot the government will dangle in front of public servants at that time, don't we?
The government will be expansive. It will be benevolent. During the next election campaign, if the economy is still doing well, it will play to the public service vote. It will promise that the freeze is almost over and the workforce adjustment directive will return. Trust us again, government members will say. However, if the economy is doing poorly the government will play to the taxpayer. It will say that it had to suspend the workforce adjustment directive.
No matter what is done, the government plays to the audience of the day. It is enough to make one a permanent political cynic watching the government flip-flop on its promises.
Public servants will remember the President of the Treasury Board when they are declared surplus under the authority of the bill. They will remember the minister for renewal in the public service and his boastful words during the election campaign. He said: "Public servants, enough is enough. I pledge to protect public servants against job loss". That is a good promise. However, 45,000 jobs later it is a pretty empty promise. He knew it at the time. Yet government members continued to make the promise during the election campaign, knowing full well that when they were on the government side of the House they would not be kept.
I will address another subject, term employees. The incentives, job offers, notice periods and other things which are offered under this bill do not apply to term employees, as opposed to indeterminate or permanent employees. Term employees have no status whatsoever under the workforce adjustment directive. Some of them have worked in government for years, but they have no status.
The 45,000 positions spoken of in the budget are all indeterminate positions. That could mean, for example, that the 24,000 term employees could be laid off at any time, in addition to the 45,000, with absolutely no incentive programs, no retirement packages, no appeal, nothing. I call on the government to treat term employees with fairness and not to lay them off in order to be able to afford more handsome payoffs for some of their own friends in the system.
My concern is with clause 3 of the bill. It lays out a plan for public servants. It empowers the cabinet to offer an early departure incentive and then it gives public servants a choice. They will have 60 days to choose whether to take the offer and go, or to refuse the offer, sit tight and hope for another job. They will remain on staff for a period of six months and then move on to unpaid surplus status for an additional 18 months. If there is no job offer after 18 months, they can be laid off.
The minister's officials have already admitted that a lot of jobs are going to be declared surplus. There will not necessarily be work for the surplus public servant to do when his or her job disappears. Yet under the bill the surplus worker will receive six months' pay regardless, in some cases for doing nothing at all.
All members of the House will remember that the President of the Treasury Board promised just a few weeks ago that no employee would be paid if he or she was not working. This was a fundamental, unbreakable, unshakeable promise on behalf of the President of the Treasury Board; that no one would be paid if there was no work to be done. Yet like so many other promises, this one too has been laid aside by this bill.
I would like to move on to clause 9 of the bill which mandates a change to the Financial Administration Act. Section 7 deals with the delegation of authority. I have real accountability concerns on this one because it says that Treasury Board may authorize any person who is part of the public service of Canada to perform functions or powers that it is able to delegate. That clause reads differently in the Financial Administration Act. The way it currently reads is actually safer, it is more restrictive. It says that anyone authorized under the Treasury Board may under the current regulations "authorize one or more persons under his jurisdiction to exercise or perform any such power or function".
It may be a small thing but it is a dangerous concept. No longer do we have separate jurisdictions. We collapse them all into one. It is a dangerous dilution of accountability and an unwise splitting of ministerial authority.
A deputy minister of Environment Canada could delegate some of his power to an official from National Defence. To which minister would the civil servants then be accountable? In the case of conflict whose orders do they follow? Both ministers would have a valid claim on their services and their actions and indeed both ministers could be held accountable for what they did.
In the end what would happen is a public servant would do something wrong and one minister could say it was really not his department, it was the other minister's department and vice versa, back and forth. Any accountability will be lost. This is a move in the wrong direction.
In the end no one would be accountable for the actions of that type of public servant. I sincerely hope that this clause will never see the light of day. I hope our members will be able to address it more fully in committee.
I want to dwell on clause 8 which gives tremendous power to the Public Service Commission, a power which should not be given to it. I want to talk about the competitive process of job applications for a moment.
Western democracies have always depended on checks and balances. This is born out of a basic mistrust of government, I think a valid mistrust of government. It is an attitude which says: "We think you are doing okay right now, but we don't know what you would do if the checks and balances were not in place". That is why we have opposition parties in the House of Commons. That is why we have opposition parties in committees and so on. It is in order to scrutinize the actions of the government.
Checks and balances are very important. They are vital for the health of a western democracy. When we see that an opposition party, for example, in some third world country is getting mistreated by the government we see that democracy, and that country in general, is in trouble. There are checks and balances right through our system.
One check against nepotism, bribery and other forms of corruption in government is the competitive process. This means that people get jobs through merit and not because they are someone's friend. That process is open to scrutiny. It is fair. It means that we get the best person for the job.
The selection process within the federal government is really quite fair. All the checks and balances are in place to make sure nepotism does not take place.
That is why I feel such concern when I read clause 8 of Bill C-76. We are in a period of flux right now, a flurry of activity, where the departments are downsizing and there is a certain amount of chaos in a big reorganization of government. During this time there is a chance that the vigilance and the controls are not going to be as strong as they have been in the past and as they usually are.
Clause 8 empowers the Public Service Commission during this chaotic and stormy time to appoint an employee without competition to another position within the jurisdiction of the deputy head for which in the opinion of the commission the employee is qualified. This is a dangerous departure from the merit principle.
Reformers believe that a system of checks and balances is the only way to ensure that corruption is weeded out of the system, and the competitive process is the check on the public service that is missing under this clause of the bill.
All sorts of irrelevant qualifications could be used here, anything from "I'm a good friend of the decision maker", to "I'm a relative of somebody else you know", to the pressure that sometimes can be imposed from the outside. That departure from the merit principle is a serious departure that public servants should be very alarmed about. At any rate, people can be appointed without consideration of merit using this clause.
I agree with the idea the commissioner should be able to appoint surplus people to different departments. However, again the merit principle in the competition should continue in that process.
If merit does not need to be a factor in this clause and if the competitive process can fall by the wayside without a backward glance in this clause, the government can use it for other purposes as well. Even under the current regulations of the Public Service Employment Act there is already in place a system under the employment equity plan by which a member of an employment equity group can be appointed to a position in accordance with an employment equity program excluding merit, discrimination and geographic area with no right of appeal. That is a serious departure from the merit principle and something the government should not be delving into. I rest my case.