Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to the Bill C-19 amendments to the Canada Labour Code which my colleagues and I are opposing.
This is an anti-democratic bill which overrides the privacy rights of workers and collective bargaining, properly conceived.
Let me say at the outset that the Reform Party has, since its founding, supported the principle of collective bargaining. We believe that workers, by joining together democratically through an appropriate, open, transparent and democratic process, may decide, quite legitimately, to negotiate collectively and bargain collectively with their employers. That is a fundamental economic right which is recognized in every liberal democracy and which is also recognized by the Reform Party.
What Bill C-19 seeks to do, by amending the Canada Labour Code, is to change the legal framework within which those collective bargaining rights are exercised by people who work in industries regulated by the federal government.
This bill changes the name and the powers of the Canada Labour Relations Board to the Canada Industrial Relations Board. The cosmetic change of its name reflects a significant change in the powers which will be given to the board.
One of the principal objections I have to the bill is that the new board will have, as my colleague from Medicine Hat mentioned, the power to ban replacement workers in federally regulated industries. That means that a company which has done its level best in fair negotiation to provide a fair deal to its employees but which finds that the union leadership, for one reason or another, decides to strike, will be held ransom. Its livelihood and ultimately the livelihood of its workers will be held at the whim of the union leadership. This company will not have the right, if proscribed by the Canada Industrial Relations Board, to replace striking workers with people who can continue to provide those goods and services. In other words, the economic viability of various companies and indeed various industries can and may very well be threatened by this bill if it is passed.
As the hon. member mentioned, the government recognizes the flaw in empowering the CIRB to ban replacement workers by exempting those workers employed in the area of grain shipping and handling at the ports. In the past there have been several instances when those workers have gone on strike and caused enormous economic turmoil for prairie grain farmers because of their inability to export overseas the grain they have produced. These amendments do not really solve that problem. The ability to hire replacement workers will not necessarily mean that grain will move. What it does mean is that we are creating a double standard for workers, one standard for those who do not work in the grain handling unions and one standard for those who do.
If banning replacement workers is wrong in the grain handling situation, then it is wrong for those who do not handle grain, those who handle other commodities, those who provide other goods and services, those who are as essential to the Canadian economy as our grain workers.
We would seek to remove the provisions of this bill which, in a discriminatory way, create a double standard with respect to replacement workers.
Another serious concern I have with the bill is its treatment of the certification issue. This bill would empower the CIRB to certify a union local at a particular place of business even if the majority of the employees at that place vote against certification.
My colleagues will correct me if I am wrong, but I thought we were living in a democracy. I thought that in a democracy the majority, or at least a strong plurality, prevailed. However, in the case of the amendments to Bill C-19 the government is saying that the principle of democracy can be marginalized.
If a bunch of appointed members of this board, likely Liberal patronage hacks, decide that a particular local place of business is to be certified, it will be certified by that board even against the overwhelming objection of the people who work there.
My colleague mentioned the recent case of a Wal-Mart store in Nelson, British Columbia, which has similar legislation to that being introduced here, where the B.C. labour relations board ordered that the Nelson Wal-Mart employees be unionized even though they voted against it in their certification vote. A similar thing happened at a Wal-Mart store in Windsor, Ontario. We could see the same thing happening across the country in federally regulated industries if these amendments are passed.
We are also concerned about the question of privacy. This bill would undermine the privacy rights of union workers. This is a very serious consideration. People are often forced into a union. We are talking about a labour regime of closed shop unions where the board can force the people to be in a certified union. Now we are saying their privacy rights are to be compromised by this bill. This is really big brother manifest in this kind of legislation and that is why we are opposed to it.
What we ought to do is look at a fair, open and transparent regime for regulating labour unions. We have no objection to people legitimately exercising their collective bargaining rights. However, this bill would create a double standard, would jeopardize the privacy rights of workers and would jeopardize the livelihoods of many businesses and potentially some industries through its treatment of replacement workers.
Finally, this bill would override the principle of democracy which should govern the treatment of unions in the certification process. Frankly, I think it is an exercise of statist tyrannical power to tell a majority of workers that they are going to be forced into a union and forced to pay dues against their will. That is simply wrong.
We ought to look at bills like this at the level of first principles. So often we get buried in the details of technical amendments like this and we lose sight of first principles. One of the principles of liberal democracy is freedom. I know it is a quaint notion to some of my friends opposite on occasion. However, that notion dictates that people cannot be coerced by the state to surrender their freedoms without their consent. Bill C-19 would seek to circumscribe the economic freedoms of workers to not be unionized, not certified and not forced to pay union dues if they choose not to.
We ought to put Bill C-19 and these amendments back on the drawing board. As the Senate committee suggested, we ought to start all over again and listen to the business groups across this country that are speaking out against this. I have received several phone calls, letters and faxes from different businesses and business organizations that say this bill constitutes a very real threat to the competitiveness of the Canadian labour force and our labour markets.
I would ask all my hon. colleagues, including those on the Liberal side, to look beyond the spin they are getting from the labour department and look at the first principles behind this bill and vote against Bill C-19.