Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for their understanding.
It is with pleasure and with a sense of duty that I rise today, as labour critic, to take part in this very important debate in the history of labour relations in Canada.
However, it is also a sad moment in the history of labour relations in Canada because of what we have seen today and in previous weeks about the way this matter has been handled. The government should be ashamed of what it has done, particularly through its public works and governmental affairs minister, nipping in the bud the negotiations that started a few months ago between both parties. Members will recall that the minister candidly admitted that the government would legislate in the event of a strike by postal workers, thereby making these negotiations meaningless.
Therefore, what we witnessed is a sad masquerade, made even worse by some disgraceful actions.
A brief review of recent events: a call for reduced use of the postal service as the strike deadline approaches, lay-offs because of the reduced activity, an announcement of Canada Post's desire to cut more than 4 000 positions, violent behaviour by one of the management team and an attack on a union negotiator, announcement of a lock-out, etc. A sad record indeed.
I shall now address the more specific question of the vicious overall character of this government's strategy and actions, the government of a sovereign country called Canada where we are witnessing what I would call orchestrated action against the unionized class, the entire middle class, everywhere on this planet, in order to diminish the role of the state, to dismantle to some extent all the mechanisms with which we have equipped ourselves in order to better share the wealth, and within which we give an obvious framework to the privatization of the principal services of the state. You will have understood that I am referring to clause 9, which I shall read:
- The mediator-arbitrator shall be guided by the need for terms and conditions of employment that are consistent with those in comparable industries in the private and public sectors and that will provide the necessary degree of flexibility to ensure the short- and long-term economic viability and competitiveness of the Canada Post Corporation, taking into account
(a) that the Canada Post Corporation must, without recourse to undue increases in postal rates,
(i) perform financially in a commercially acceptable range,
(ii) operate efficiently,
(iii) improve productivity, and
(iv) meet acceptable standards of service; and
(b) the importance of good labour-management relations between the Canada Post Corporation and the union.
This is an orchestrated operation, in Canada as in France, as in Germany, as in Italy, and everywhere else in the West, to ensure that those who have done well for themselves, particularly by unionizing workers and salaried employees, are now seeing their powers, their advantages, systematically diminished.
I would like to share with you the remarks that appeared yesterday in Le Monde Diplomatique , written by a European of substance, Ignacio Ramonet. He wrote the following in this paper, and his remarks are very relevant to what is happening here, with everything orchestrated in my opinion. That must be said so that finally a debate may be held in the West, indeed worldwide, soon, to make economic progress synonymous with human progress.
I quote Mr. Ramonet:
Financial globalization has created its own government. A supranational government with its own machinery, influence networks and means of action. I am talking of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). These four institutions speak with one voice—echoed by almost all of the major media—in exalting “market virtues”.
This world government is a power without a society, that role belonging to the financial markets and giant corporations it represents. The effect of this is that real societies have no power. The situation continues to worsen. As the successor to the GATT, since 1995, the WTO has acquired supranational powers and is out of reach of the controls of parliamentary democracy.
And I said parliamentary democracy.
Once seized of an issue, it can declare national labour, environmental or public health legislation “contrary to free trade” and call for their repeal.
This is the scenario we are facing here in this House. Fortunately, the opposition parties have formed a fine coalition of the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois. This means we can bring an element of humanity to clause 9 by pointing out that Canada Post, for as long as it exists in Canada in this form, is a public service with a logic, a consistency and the expectations we might have of a public service with all its strengths and weaknesses and constraints and not a private enterprise with its own internal logic.
I want to emphasize here the role of my colleague from Champlain who has done such outstanding work today. He succeeded in uniting all our forces in making this government listen to reason because it was embarking with indifference and cynicism on the road to neo-liberalism which is making the poor poorer and the rich richer. So if there are people who are not doing too badly, it is not by the grace of God or the Virgin Mary, it is because they succeeded in unionizing. It is through a great struggle that they won the right to unionize; such a right was never given to them, they always had to fight for it.
We must condemn measures as cynical as those we are seeing today in order to protect what we have here in Canada, in Quebec, in America, in the West, where the union movement is concentrated, because we know that everywhere else, we cannot even speak in terms of unionization, because the situation is so bad.
It is essential that the people and organizations such as unions which ensure a better distribution of wealth always have their say and that the debate is increasingly public, open and vigorous.
Because wealth is not evenly distributed, we have to ensure through the unions, through the governments, including those in Quebec and in Canada who have received a mandate and assumed their responsibility to distribute the wealth, that this will continue and that we understand that it is not by keeping the wealth in the hands of multinationals, in the hands of supranational corporations that make sovereign states powerless that we can achieve human progress.
There has to be in fact a better distribution of wealth, and tax shelters should be questioned and tax havens eliminated. This is a shameful process that allows those among us who are more fortunate to literally laugh at low wage earners, at the people who dutifully pay their taxes, because of all sorts of manoeuvres that the auditor general has condemned here in Canada, even if attempts were made to prevent him from speaking out in the finance committee, as I saw with my own eyes.
So I am very proud of the role that the opposition played today and I hope that the government will change attitude in the future.