Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-19, to amend the Canada Labour Code, part I.
In my presentation I will briefly outline Bill C-19, although that has been well done by members who spoke before. I want to speak a little about unions and their roles in Canada. Then I want to focus mainly on the impact of the legislation on the grain industry. I will focus most of my comments on the impact of the legislation on farmers and their families and especially on what is missing from the legislation that will have an incredibly negative impact on farmers and their ability to access markets and earn a living.
Other speakers before me have done a good job of outlining the bill. Some members have done an excellent job in pointing out some of the flaws in the bill. The member for Calgary—Nose Hill did an excellent job in making it clear that it is an important piece of legislation that should not be taken lightly and has to be reconsidered. She did an admirable job of pointing out some of the key flaws in the legislation.
I will start by talking a bit about unions. I received several letters on the bill, as did the member for Guelph—Wellington. One thing that concerned me in many of the letters was the negative comments of people against unions. Many said that unions should not be allowed anywhere in the grain industry. That is too bad.
I want to say very clearly that unions serve a very useful role. They have a purpose and they are necessary. If unions are not present in certain industries, some businesses would take advantage of labour. That is a concern. It is unfortunate a few unions that have not acted in a responsible way have turned the feelings of people against them. That is an important concern.
To help improve the unions, their effectiveness and their acceptance, certain things must happen. We need better balance between labour and management, which is something the bill does not offer. It also does not offer the protection needed for innocent third parties.
The bill deals to some extent with grain at the ports and the moving of grain out of the ports. It affects farmers in a small way, in a positive way, but it does very little to protect farmers, people in the forestry industry and people in the mining industry. It does not protect any of the people affected in a negative way as third parties. These are the people who have no say in the unions or in management. Yet their livelihoods are affected to a great degree as a result of work stoppages.
We need better protection for innocent third parties. A little later I will focus on one particular group, grain farmers who are innocent third parties in any dispute which stops the movement of grain from the local elevator to being loaded on a boat in harbour.
I would like to talk about farmers and how they are affected by work stoppages. We have debated several times since we came to the House legislation concerning labour and management disputes. Since 1956 we have had nine major disruptions in the grain industry. It began in 1956 and went right through to 1972, 1974, 1975, 1982, 1986, 1988, 1991 and 1994. There have been over a dozen other labour-management disputes involving grain handling and transportation which have ended up in back to work legislation.
In the 1998 stoppage 30% of the country's grain exports were stopped dead. How many grain handlers in the union were involved to stop 30% of the export of grain? There were 69 grain handlers involved who were unhappy with their working conditions and stopped the export of 30% of the grain. This affected in a very personal way the lives of grain farmers who were unable to move their grain to market. I believe that demonstrates the seriousness of the situation, the seriousness of the legislation, and the seriousness of the flaws in the bill which will do very little to change things.
Growing up on a grain farm, I remember going to school during times of work stoppage and speaking with friends. My friends at school, who also grew up on farms, were mostly quite poor. That was the situation then, although people did not complain about it. We certainly had the necessities of life. My neighbours and friends during the times of work stoppages felt the negative impact in a way that we could see and hear in our discussions. They were unable to get the new footwear or the new clothes they needed. Their parents, in many cases, were struggling to put food on the table.
These work stoppages are connected with reality. They have an impact on people's lives. This legislation does not do what has to be done to stop the impact which these work stoppages have on farmers and others who are captive to the labour-management relationship.
Section 87.7 of the bill will make a little difference. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour referred to a letter she had received from a farmer with respect to this section of the bill. This section will ensure that the grain that gets to port is loaded on to a ship. That is not entirely true because more and more of our crops are moving through bulk handling facilities where that would not be the case. When using the bulk handling facilities there is no requirement to load the grain on to a ship.
Furthermore, the definition of grain that is used in the legislation is the same as that used in the Canada Grain Act.
The hon. member for Yorkton—Melville referred to the fact that it will not have any impact at all on many farm commodities.
Farmers are trying to diversify. Government has encouraged farmers to diversify. They can no longer depend on wheat alone. The farmers have done a good job in doing that. They have started to produce all kinds of alternative crops. It used to be that wheat, barley and oats were the main crops on the prairies, as well as some rye and some flax. Now canola rivals wheat in terms of the value of the crop being sold. There are many other crops such as peas, lentils and alfalfa. The member referred to alfalfa being cubed and sent mostly to Asian countries, but alfalfa is not covered at all in this legislation because under the Canada Grain Act it is not a grain.
Farmers have diversified. They have done what they thought they should do. Their reward with this legislation is that the new diversified crops which they are producing to earn a reasonable livelihood most years will sit wherever they are in the system and will not be moved. They will be denied the income from these commodities until an agreement is reached between labour and management. It will take a long time to fix up the system once it has been thrown out of whack by a work stoppage.
These people are being punished for the work they have done and the changes they have made to try to better provide for their families and to make their businesses more viable.
I refer to the letter the parliamentary secretary received from a western farmer who supports this bill. She quoted from the letter to show that we should be supporting the bill. However, part of the quote was really not all that supportive. The farmer said this is a good first step. To me that would indicate there is an awful lot more which needs to be done. This is the best she can do to show support for the bill.
When I am in government I will not be satisfied with simply providing a good first step. We have to go further.
This is what the Reform Party has been proposing over the last four years. We dealt with the first back to work legislation in 1994. I think it was my second speech in the House of Commons. We had only been down here a couple of weeks. We talked about ending work stoppages in the grain handling system right from one end of the system to the other, not just ensuring that grain that gets to port gets loaded on the ships, which is all this legislation will do.
What we proposed is using final offer arbitration to end work stoppages. We have talked about this on several occasions in this House and I believe it is a process which must be put in place to end stoppages such as the frequent stoppages we have seen in the grain handling system.
In particular, this type of collective bargaining should be used when there is a third party which is completely captive to labour and management. In this case there are thousands and thousands of grain farmers across the country who are captive to union and management, yet they have no say at all in the negotiations. They have no place at the negotiation table.
The type of situation we are talking about is for grain movement but also for movement of coal, potash, forestry products, many resource areas in particular where they are captive and are affected very directly, not in some indirect way. Their livelihoods, their incomes depend on these products moving to ports.
Yet in this legislation government says for grain, as defined by the Canada Grain Act, it will make sure it keeps moving as long as it gets to port. Then the member for Guelph—Wellington has the nerve to stand up and say they have done a great job and refers to the farmer who wrote the letter saying it is a first step. That is completely unacceptable and I think the member should expect more. It is from her government.
Again, Reform not only critiques legislation, points out areas that we think are not right and that could be improved, we also present alternatives.
I want to talk about the Reform alternative in dealing with commodities where the producers are captive shippers and yet have no place at all at the bargaining table. What we propose is the use of final offer selection arbitration.
I am going to work through the process. The purpose of a strike is to force a settlement. That is the reason that union members choose to strike from time to time, to force a solution. Final offer arbitration puts the onus on both sides to reach an agreement, to arrive at a solution. It allows the collective bargaining process to take place right through to solution. It can be used equally by labour and management. It does not favour one over the other and it can provide a permanent solution and it is a just and effective dispute settlement mechanism.
It is important to note that this final offer selection arbitration, in spite of the way it is presented so often by members from some parties, does not favour one side over the other. It is not something there for business to use against labour, not at all. It is as useful for one side as the other.
Here is how it works. If and only if the union and an employer cannot reach an agreement by the conclusion of the previous contract, the union and employer would provide the minister with the name of a person or persons they jointly recommend as an arbiter or an arbitration panel. Then the union and the employer would be required to submit to the arbitrator or the panel, depending on what they choose, a list of matters they have agreed on.
There is no need for more negotiation on these matters. They have reached a settlement. In many cases before a situation comes to strike many of the issues have been settled, so those are taken out of the process at this point.
They also submit a list of matters still under dispute, and those are the issues which must be presented to the arbitrator or to the panel. For these disputed issues, each party would be required to submit a final offer for settlement. The arbitrator or panel selects either the final offer submitted by the trade union or the final offer submitted by business, by the employer. In this way any work stoppage is completely headed off.
That sounds like a more complete solution to the problem than saying if we get the grain to the coast and loaded on the ships, the system can be backed up in every other aspect. It may take months to really sort the situation out and it usually does. There could be sales lost, which there always are, to the point that Canada now is looked on as an unreliable supplier of grains and other commodities affected often by labour disruptions.
I think that does sound like a far more reasonable solution to the problem. It is the solution that we have been encouraging now for four years, a solution which I do not believe was seriously considered by this government, and I think it should be.
I close by saying that farmers and other captive shippers deserve a mechanism which will ensure them as captive shippers, as people who really have no place at the table and yet their livelihoods are affected so directly, that they have something better than this legislation. They deserve a system of final offer selection arbitration and that is what Reform will give them when we have a chance, if this government does not see the light before then and give it to them.