Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak on Bill C-233 in support of my colleague from Wetaskiwin. He has put a great deal of thought and a great deal of time into this problem, not only for the west coast ports but for other matters which may later be addressed by this as well.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour said that she was very puzzled by this. I will try to clear up some of those things that seem to puzzle her.
She said that final offer arbitration is very one sided and results in one side being very bitter about the settlement. I suggest that she ask the Canadian Union of Postal Workers what it thought of her government's settlement which used a different method. She should ask if the postal workers are bitter.
She may be even more puzzled by something that is in keeping with the comments of the NDP member who just spoke. He spoke about how this is a right wing plot by the Reform Party. He also mentioned that final offer arbitration was used for a number of years in Manitoba. But he did not mention that it was put in by the NDP government which is kind of to the left. It is not right wing like Reform.
This method was taken out by the Conservative Party. That party sits to the right of the Reform Party here in this House. The NDP members who sit on the far left of the House are saying that this is a terrible right wing plot, but it was put in by them and it was taken out by the Conservative Party whose members sit on the righthand side of the Reform Party. If the parliamentary secretary was not really puzzled before, that must really get her spinning.
A number of misconceptions need to be cleared up. The NDP member has used this one before, as have many others. It is the old sabre rattle about how Reform is trying to take away the rights of workers to collective bargaining with bills like Bill C-233.
For someone who says he has been involved in labour negotiations for a number of years, to steal the words of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour, I am really puzzled as to what he thinks collective bargaining is. Strikes and lockouts are not collective bargaining. Strikes and lockouts are the result of the failure of collective bargaining.
Collective bargaining involves three things. It involves negotiation. It involves conciliation. And it involves mediation. When those things fail, the company locks out the workers, or the workers withdraw their services from the company. That is not collective bargaining. It is a failure of collective bargaining.
The strike or lockout is a dispute settlement mechanism. It is a form of coercion used by one party against the other to drive them back to one of the three real parts of collective bargaining: negotiate, conciliate, mediate. That is collective bargaining. We have no intention of taking collective bargaining away from anyone.
Both members who spoke in opposition to the bill suggested final offer arbitration rarely needs to be used. Consider Canada Post which was mentioned by both members. There was a strike in 1987 and the government legislated the workers back to work. The next strike was in 1991 and the government legislated them back to work. The next time up was 1997 and the government legislated them back to work. There is a bit of a pattern here, is there not?
The early 1970s saw the first ever strike of air traffic controllers. The government legislated them back to work. The second time around the workers took a strike vote. They had not yet gone on strike but the government legislated them back before they went out and imposed a settlement on them. That does not make for a happy side. And the parliamentary secretary to the minister was worried that final offer arbitration would make one side bitter. I was an air traffic controller in those days and I can tell her that the government's methods made one side very bitter.
Then a ports strike crippled the country in 1994. The government legislated them back to work. We had a rail strike in 1995 and the government legislated them back to work. There is a long history of the government intervening in labour disruptions in this country.
Then the problem comes in. We have already heard figures mentioned about the cost of the ports strike. The more recent Canada Post strike cost Canada Post in loss of revenues, workers in loss of wages. The NDP is so concerned about the rights of workers. Lots of workers suffered financial devastation themselves through loss of wages. The union lost a tremendous amount of money paying out the strike pay and the cost of the negotiations that were going on with this process.
Charities and mail dependent business collectively lost somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion in the last postal strike because the government failed to act on a prompt basis. And it failed to have a method in place like the one proposed by my colleague in Bill C-233 to deal with the problem in the west coast ports.
At the port of Vancouver in my province of British Columbia, we used to have among other things, grain, a tremendous number of shipments of potash. A lot of the potash from Saskatchewan does not go to Vancouver any more. It goes to Portland, Oregon. Portland, Oregon said to ship it there instead, that they would build the facilities and they would guarantee it would be delivered on time.
We are losing our ability to trade internationally because the government has failed to put in place some method of settlement that is fair to both sides. How can it possibly be one sided when each side has the exact same power as the other, no more and no less?
The member from the NDP said that this is terrible because it will not allow the parties to reach a settlement. They could both go with the same settlement. They would say that they did not mean it to go that far. All they would have to do is to go to the arbitrator making the decision with their common presentation and they would have a settlement.
What this in fact does is it puts out a message to both the employer and the employees that if one side's demands are outrageous and the other side's demands are not, they will lose. That is the way it should be. That is reasonable and proper.
Under the current system, workers lose wages and the company loses revenue. The workers and the company collectively lose business which means jobs and this devastates the national economy.
In the case of the port we talked about the impact going all the way back to the prairie grain farmers. It affected me in my riding 400 miles inland from the port in British Columbia. In my riding I have a mill and a smelter that almost got shut down because all the ore was locked up in the port.
This is something that cannot go on. If the government thinks that we can have a system that allows people to willy-nilly go on strike, which has a devastating impact on the national economy and of people totally unconnected to the job, then it has to rethink its priorities.
Let us talk about a corner store. The workers in that corner store say “Give us a dollar or we are on strike” and the owner says “No, I am only giving you 50 cents”. They go on strike. What is the impact? It is an economic tug of war between the employer and the employees.
Who else is hurt? Some of the neighbours are inconvenienced because they will have to go to a different store. The families of those workers are going to be harmed but it is the impact directly related to their families' jobs. There may be a little economic spin-off in the immediate area if it happens to be a big store. Primarily it is right there located within that worksite.
In the case of the Vancouver port, there can be an impact felt 2,000 miles away by people totally unrelated to the port, thousands of different people in all kinds of different industries, such as farming or other businesses across the country. The government does not only have the right to act, it has a duty and a requirement to act.
This bill tries to address a real problem that the government itself has already recognized by intervening time after time after time when these types of situations have come up in the national interest.
Now is the time for the government to recognize the old system is not working in the interests of Canadians and to say that it is time for a little evolution to take place in collective bargaining.
Collective bargaining will still exist. All we will be doing is putting in a more effective final dispute settlement mechanism. If the government cannot see that, it is time it moved aside and allowed someone else to do it.