“It is a longer story” as the member for Winnipeg Centre says.
I begin by congratulating the member for Winnipeg Centre on the fine work he has done today in successfully bringing a constructive amendment to fruition in the back to work legislation, Bill C-24.
He prevented the government from advancing the privatization of Canada Post in the guise of emergency legislation. This is what the initial instructions to the mediator-arbitrator are all about. They are trying to do indirectly what the government so far has not had the courage to do directly, that is to talk about the privatization of Canada Post which many believe is on its agenda.
Having said that, when I talk about bringing out the worst in parliament I am really talking about the motion the government moved yesterday, Motion No. 8. Because we were in the process of negotiating with the government with respect to the amendment I just mentioned, we decided not to oppose Motion No. 8 in the context of our discussions with the government about trying to get an agreement on the very important amendment we were putting forward.
All members of the opposition should be concerned about the nature of that motion. Basically the government could have done it without opposition and therefore with the consent of the House. It could have done it without the consent of the House. It could have been prevented from doing it on a particular day by 25 members rising in their place. It could have gone on to debate that motion until members of the opposition were exhausted, at which point the motion would have been voted on by the majority. It would have been decided by the House, by the will of the majority and not by the consent of the House, to deal with all stages of the legislation in one day.
This means that the government has in reserve what might be called the parliamentary dictatorship clause. We do all the other things we do here when we have first reading, second reading or send a matter to committee, as long as the government does not want to have it right away.
That is not observed because it has to be observed. On days like today and weeks like this week we learn that it is not something guaranteed in the way we do business around here. It is just convention. It is courtesy. It is an optional process because when the government wants to do otherwise it can. That is what should worry all members of this House, particularly opposition members.
I wanted to say earlier that I was surprised the Reform Party allowed its zeal for putting workers back to work to blind its members to the precedent that they were allowing the government to set by using once again this draconian standing order without any objection on the part of the Reform Party and without the Reform Party ever asking for anything in return.
I see a parliamentary tragedy in so far as we all want to believe the Reform Party is sincere in its objection to the way the government sometimes abuses parliament. Here was a cardinal abuse of parliament and there was nothing but silence on the part of the Reform Party.
I understand why the Conservatives were quiet because they brought in this standing order in the first place. I believe this standing order was brought in, in 1991, by the Conservative Party. Perhaps they would have felt too embarrassed to get up and say that they really felt the use of this standing order was a bad thing because they created it.
One of the other things I do not understand is why the Liberals, when the Tories brought in this particular standing order, stood in their places in this House and decried it as a treacherous act against Parliament. I do not know why the Liberals sought to use this particular standing order and why they feel no compunction about using the very thing which they so decried in previous incarnations, particularly in opposition incarnations.
What I meant by the best was what we saw today in committee of the whole. Lots of members were present. It was perhaps the way Canadians imagine Parliament, with every member in the Chamber, with amendments being debated and with the government actually having to talk to the opposition to arrive at some kind of compromise.
In this case the Liberals felt, for whatever reason, that they wanted the approval of some opposition parties. They did not have to deal with the Reform Party because they already had its members in their pocket. However, for some reason or another they felt it was useful to have the NDP and the Bloc on side, so we were able to amend this legislation in a constructive way.
Is that not what Parliament should be about all the time, instead of having what is normally the case with a majority government, which is a kind of parliamentary dictatorship for four years until there is another election to decide which members get to be the collective dictatorship for the next four years?
That is what I meant by Parliament at its best. Everyone is engaged. The government has to relate in a real, not a pro forma, way to the opposition.
That is my concern at the procedural level, but I want to say a word in the time I have left to the matter at hand, the question of the actions of Canada Post and the government and the situation which the Canadian Union of Postal Workers members find themselves in.
I want to address one particular thing, because obviously I cannot cover the waterfront, and that is the thing that we sometimes hear. I have heard it from some members of Parliament. We hear it on the street. We hear it here and there. People say these guys are paid good money. What are they complaining about? How do they have the nerve to go on strike, to ask for more, to demand job security or to demand that the jobs which are already there be protected?
This country, the country which people like, the country which the United Nations rates as number one or number two over and over again, was built on decent wages. It was not built on low wages. Every time some Canadian fights to keep their good wage everybody should cheer them on. They are fighting for all of us as we head down the road to a low wage economy which has been planned for us in the corporate boardrooms of this country year after year, starting with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the NAFTA, the WTO and now the multilateral agreement on investment. That is what has happened.
We are not doing our children and our grandchildren any favours by acquiescing to this, by saying we have to get more competitive. That basically means that families cannot make ends meet on one income any more. It is not just a question of wages being high or low, it is also a question of the social fabric of this country and the fact that families cannot finance themselves on one low income.
Many families can finance themselves on one decent income or on one high income, high income in the sense of high income for working people, the kind of unionized wages that have enabled a generation of Canadians to own homes, to put their kids through university, to have a new car once in a while and to have some recreational aspect in their lives. All of that was not possible for the previous generation and now we are saying that it is not competitive and we do not want it any more. We want to conform to a different global economic model in which we all have to scratch around like ants to make a living at the behest of the corporate elite who want us to take less and less both in terms of private wages and in terms of social wages.
The NDP is here to say we do not buy it. We do not buy when it is done to postal workers. We do not buy when it is done to railroad workers. We do not buy when it is done to anybody.
We are all in this together; one group of people who have been paid well historically are attacked and asked to accept less and less, whether they are Department of National Defence employees whose work is being contracted out or transformed through alternative service delivery and other euphemisms, or paying people half of what they used to make, not in order to save money. Sometimes it costs just as much to contract out. The people who are doing the contracting out are raking the money off the top instead of it going to the people who used to receive the same amount of money in the form of decent wages.
All this is wrong. Canadians ought to be standing shoulder to shoulder with all Canadians who stand up to this notion that somehow we all have to embrace the low wage economy and accept the fact that we will not have time to staff the community clubs, the volunteer groups and all the other things that have been done by Canadians because they did not have to spend their whole life making enough money to make ends meet. They could count on a decent wage and time left over to look after their children and to look after their community. We are losing that and it is because of legislation like this.