Yes, Madam Speaker.
There are so many places to start I hardly know where to begin. My colleague the parliamentary secretary implies that employees are now not being paid a fair wage. She says she would like to see that and so would I.
However I would put to my hon. colleague that people are being paid fair wages. Evidence of that is in my talk where I say that there have been very few complaints made. Of the complaints made, a lot of them have been found to have no basis. There is quite conclusive proof that people are being paid fair wages at the time.
The parliamentary secretary further says that there is no 100% guarantee that the system they are considering will work. I propose that the system now is working. Case in point, there are .00002% of the cases where it is not working. That is so close to 100% I do not see how the parliamentary secretary could possibly argue.
On the matter of overtime, these schedules we are talking about would restrict workers to work eight hours a day. Any time after that would have to be overtime. I realize that my friends in the more socialist parties would say that is great, that it is a good thing.
However a lot of contracts now are negotiated by the employer and the union to allow trades people and labourers to work four 10-hour days rather than five 8-hour days. The result of that is when they are working away from home, as in the construction business, most of the time they can work their 40 hours in four days rather than five days and have a long weekend every weekend. They would have actually more time to spend with their families.
If we come in with wage schedules that say that it cannot be done, then we will deny these people time spent with their families. I am positive my colleagues would not want to have these people spending more time on the job and less time with their families.
I thought I had done such a good job of delivering information, unbiased of course, to my colleague from the Bloc that he would certainly support this. I was very surprised to see that he would say “yes, yes, I think it is a good idea that the federal government would interfere with the wage schedules and hours of work in my province of Quebec”. I was amazed.
I thought all along that the Bloc among other things, stood for more autonomy of the provinces, more devolution of power to the provinces, more made in the province solutions rather than top down things from the federal government, a paternal type of government. I guess I was wrong.
My colleague from the Bloc talked about a vacuum. There is no vacuum. The area that he claims to be a vacuum is filled by people who are getting fair wages. The case for that again is 99.888% of the contracts now are being paid fair wages.
I want to close on this note. I think my time is pretty well up. I think that any time I am admonished by the NDP, my constituents leap up and say “yahoo, that guy is on the right track”.