Mr. Speaker, as I rise today to speak about Bill C-19, I want to continue with a theme introduced by my colleagues this morning. I thought one of the best ways to do that perhaps would be to read from a letter I received from a constituent to set the scene. I know one of the members on the Liberal side read from a letter, so I am going to do exactly the same thing.
This letter came to me from a very concerned constituent who has done quite a lot of research into Bill C-19 and is particularly concerned with the democratic aspects of it.
If I can quote a bit from the letter just to set the scene: The Minister of Labour introduced Bill C-19 on November 6, 1997, and this bill contains most of the amendments that were incorporated in Bill C-66. Regrettably the revised version contains the same defects its predecessor displayed. The result is that the changes that would have made the labour code a better enactment are more than offset by the provisions which perpetuate undemocratic rules and introduce measures which will make Canadian enterprises subject to federal labour legislation less competitive”. Bill C-66 was from the last Parliament.
This letter highlights three of the deficiencies in detail, although it mentions quite a number of them. I would like to outline a couple of those. The minister has not followed the recommendations of the Senate standing committee on social affairs, science and technology when it studied Bill C-66 when it was before the House previously. The recommendations made really suggested that this federal legislation should give the right to workers to participate in secret ballot representation votes to determine whether a union would represent them.
Provincial labour legislation in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland currently mandates secret ballots. It is only the NDP in B.C., when it recently came into power, that removed this right to secret ballots. That caused quite a lot of outrage in B.C. not just from business people but from union people as well that this ability to have a secret vote had been removed.
Frankly, it amazes me that the NDP in B.C. and the NDP in this House, which both claim to be democratic, are not up in arms about this taking away of the democratic right for members in the union to have secret ballots.
It is hard to think of anything less democratic than placing union members in a position of being unable to cast their votes in a secret ballot. It leaves members of unions wide open to coercion by overzealous union bosses and to delegates who perhaps are getting carried away with a particular cause and just force people, through fear or otherwise, to vote in a particular manner.
Imagine if we ran federal or provincial elections that way. Canada would be the target of sanctions and criticisms from the entire free world if we were selecting people in ballots that were not secret.
I wonder how Liberal members can sleep at night knowing they are going to be voting with the instructions of their whip for something so undemocratic. The NDP members should be outraged. They should be jumping in their seats at this blatant attack on democracy against their union members. They have already demonstrated, by their interventions during the speech by the Reform member for Calgary—Nose Hill this morning, that they are not interested in even trying to defend the rights of the workers, the people they claim they are representing.
As one of my colleagues mentioned a little earlier, Tommy Douglas would be turning in his grave if he could see the NDP today. Tommy Douglas represented my riding back in the mid-1960s. Tommy Douglas was the person who achieved the highest ever percentage of votes in the riding of North Vancouver—Burnaby. He actually got 52.4% of the vote.
The second highest was achieved by Reform in the 1997 election when I got 49.9% of the vote. While it was still 3% away from the record set by Tommy Douglas, it does show an interesting progression in my riding, to digress for a moment. How it started was with the NDP in the mid-1960s, then it moved briefly to the Liberals, then back to the NDP, then to the PCs and now to Reform. It is certainly interesting that Reform today is representing a greater percentage that has ever happened since the Tommy Douglas days. He would be turning in his grave today if he could see what is happening with the NDP failing to fight for worker rights in this bill.
Could it be that the NDP likes this bill because it virtually guarantees forced union certification, which in turn means the compulsory extraction of union dues from workers, which in turn helps fill the coffers of the NDP? Maybe the NDP is not as democratic as it likes to make itself out to be. Maybe the NDP does not actually stand for New Democratic Party; maybe it stands for the no democracy party.
I will return to the points in the letter because it is a communication from the real world, outside of this place. It details problems that are in Bill C-19, this hastily thought out legislation that is being rushed through. There is really no need to rush this through. It has been 25 years since this labour code has been revised. There really is no need to rush through these sorts of provisions.
I quote one of the objections listed in this letter:
The new bill gives the Canada Industrial Relations Board the jurisdiction to certify a trade union that does not have majority support where “but for the unfair labour practice, the union could reasonably have been expected to have the support of the majority of employees in a unit”.
Frankly, no union should ever be certified without a secret ballot. If there are problems in the way the procedure took place leading up to the ballot that should be dealt with in other ways. To take away the right of free ballot for the workers, to punish the employer, is totally ludicrous. I cannot imagine why or how this government could think that was justified in any way.
To quote again from the letter:
Neither the Canada Industrial Relations Board nor any other body has the capacity to rationally discharge a task which involves nothing more than wild speculation. If an employer has committed an unfair labour practice, the board should sanction the employer, not deprive workers of the democratic right to vote on the wisdom of union representation.
The dangers associated with this type of law were demonstrated when the Ontario Labour Relations Board, ignoring the will of the workers, certified the United Steelworkers of America as the bargaining agent for workers in a Wal-Mart Canada Inc. store in Windsor. The workers had voted 151-43 against union representation.
Imagine if we were conducting our votes in Canada that way. Imagine if we had a federal election where the chief electoral officer could decide that he did not like the outcome in a particular riding and that he would appoint some other candidate to be the MP other than the winning candidate, thereby taking away the right of the voters in order to rectify some perceived wrong that occurred during the campaign.
It is absolutely outrageous. If that were to happen in a true federal election situation, the chief electoral officer would order another vote and therefore return the power to the people who have the vote, not take away that right. That is another good example of why this is a terrible provision in the bill.
Just to remind the House, the Senate Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology presented its report on Bill C-66 on April 25, 1997. The government has had plenty of time to review and think about the report.
The report stated that the committee had “concerns about whether the recent use of a similar clause by the Ontario Labour Relations Board in the Wal-Mart case is in fact an appropriate use of such a measure”. The letter writer shares this reservation, keenly aware of the danger that this provision represents to the democratic values Canadians hold and cherish.
I would like to finish by mentioning that all of us in the House should be fighting the bill tooth and nail. It tramples on the democratic rights of Canadian workers. It violates the fundamentals of freedom of voting in society. It somehow suggests that cards are a reliable indication of a worker's intent in the certification process. Just the fact that we can get someone to sign a card is sufficient proof the person will also support the forming of a union in a ballot. It is an absolutely ludicrous provision.
When the legislation is passed it will eliminate the need for unions to report on their financial status. This is unbelievable. That would put them in the same class as charities, which the House is just beginning to recognize needs to be dealt with, where they are totally unaccountable for the way they spend their money and are unanswerable to the people who give them money to do their work.
I could speak about the bill for some time but I see my time has elapsed. I will now leave it for my colleagues to take up the charge.