Mr. Speaker, I spoke to the bill earlier this year. One of the reasons I like to speak to labour legislation is that in my previous life pre-parliament I worked in the union certification climate in the forest industry. I currently represent an area with a very high union membership, the same area where I worked previously. It is one of the many industries that has undergone tremendous change over the last several years.
We are seeing that on a global scale. We are certainly seeing it big time in the resource industries in Canada. We are going to see those kinds of changes coming to government as well.
I know there have been a lot of changes in government bureaucracy, but they pale in comparison to what has been going on in the private sector.
Some of the things that I was involved in, for example, went far beyond labour negotiations, union-management style negotiations. They went into joint training on environmental concerns, how to implement things like changing operating methods to meet changing standards in the forest practices code and all those kinds of things.
It blurs the lines between who belongs to management and who belongs to the union. Everyone has a joint goal and it is very refreshing.
Anything we can do to create an environment and an atmosphere where people have the same set of objectives and tend to be headed in the same direction would be very useful indeed. If we can take the polarization out, take the confrontation out, then I think we have really achieved something. There are some proposals on the table from the Reform Party that tend to do that.
I realize that does not address the specifics of this bill, but I thought I would put it on the table anyway.
What we are talking about today is a bill that would amend Part I of the Canada Labour Code to rename the Canada Labour Relations Board to the Canada Industrial Relations Board.
This bill died in the Senate in the last parliament when it was Bill C-66. It died for good reasons and now it has been brought back with minor changes. The changes that have been made still do not address very significant problems in the bill. It is still laced with problems.
The group of amendments that we are addressing at this time have all been put forward by the Bloc. They are Bloc Motions Nos. 1 to 5. I might add that 30 motions have been put forward to amend this legislation. Other amendments were proposed at committee. This gives us some idea of the significance of the desire to effect change within this legislative package.
All of the amendments we will be discussing over the next several days came from either the official opposition as Reform amendments or from the Bloc.
Motion No. 1 is very similar to an amendment that Reform moved in committee. It requires that candidates for the chair and vice-chair of the CIRB be appointed only if the parliamentary committee approves and it requires the parliamentary committee to hold hearings.
If this is thought about on a larger scale, we could go beyond the CIRB to think about this in other contexts. There is growing pressure from the populous, from anyone concerned about democracy, to head toward removing patronage from these positions to make them more effective.
We have another circumstance right now where our information commissioner is retiring. He is saying publicly that the last person we want to run the information commissioner's office is a career bureaucrat. He says we want somebody who has displayed independent spirit, independent means and independence from government, someone who will lend themselves to an atmosphere which tends to hold government accountable as opposed to trying to support the bureaucracy against the best interests of society.
This is a growing concern and one we have brought to the table for several years in this House. We would like to see this type of motion expanded to include all of our boards because patronage rewards friends rather than putting people—