Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on the Group No. 2 motions before us at report stage of Bill C-19.
I am pleased to see you back in the chair, Mr. Speaker. I knew you would be pleased that I was speaking whilst on your watch.
I would like to follow up a little more on the points raised by the Reform member who spoke. It would be nice if we could call the members here by their names. I realize it is tradition that we have to call them by their riding names.
Something interesting happened to the New Zealand parliament when it switched to the MMP system of representation. Half of the members do not actually having ridings. They are selected on the basis of party lists. The house was faced with the problem of how to identify members when they cannot be called by a riding name. They dispensed completely with calling people by the ridings and now they call each other by their names. It raises the question why it was even necessary to have this tradition in the past anyway. But I digress as I tend to do, and I will get back to the point we were talking about.
A little earlier my colleague from the Kootenay area riding was talking about the 35% threshold for certifying a union. It really puzzles me how the NDP, which claims to be the New Democratic Party, can argue against democracy in this way.
I reinforce the argument of my colleague. How could you possibly take 35% to be representative of the majority? As my colleague mentioned, if the Bloc Quebecois had that rule for their Quebec referendum, especially if they could argue coercion, that people on the way to the polling booth to vote had to walk through an armada of no signs, they would automatically get certified for separation. It is totally ludicrous. If you have democracy you have democracy and that means a majority.
Perhaps the NDP support for such a concept is based on the fact that the workers have to compulsorily contribute to the NDP through their union dues. There are plenty of workers out there who do not want to do that.
The Wal-Mart affair in Ontario is certainly a good example of that. The Canada Industrial Relations Board in its wisdom certified the union when 151 of the Wal-Mart employees at the Windsor store voted against a union and 43 voted for it. How could a union possibly be certified under those circumstances? There were 151 against and 43 for a union and it was certified. Why? Because the CIRB made a random decision that the employer was unfair.
Now the workers are organizing to decertify. I would say that almost certainly indicates that their will has been absolutely defied by the Canada Industrial Relations Board. It is absolutely appalling that those people on the CIRB would use their political bent, their ideology to force a decision upon unwilling workers.
We will certainly be watching the ongoing happenings with that particular decertification drive. I think it will show conclusively that workers want control of their own destiny. They do not want these sorts of undemocratic laws forced upon them.
Reform's Motion No. 30 would fix this problem of 35%. The bill as it stands allows the Canada Industrial Relations Board to certify a union even if there is no evidence of majority support if the board believes there would have been support had it not been for the employer's unfair labour practices. That is a really subjective judgment.
The determination of what constitutes an unfair labour practice is left entirely up to the Canada Industrial Relations Board. The Wal-Mart case as I said illustrates that. What we would like to see is that a union not be certified unless there is a secret ballot held and a majority of the workers have to support that idea of a union.
Motion No. 7 also proposed by the Reform Party deals with the Canada Labour Code which states that the board may, and I underline may, hold a representational vote on union certification to satisfy itself that the workers want the union. The word is “may” and we would like to see that as “must”.
Again, how can we possibly guarantee a democratic process if we do not allow people to vote? The same members in this House who want to certify unions with 35% with all sorts of arbitrary procedures would never ever agree to such procedures in their own ridings.
You can laugh, Mr. Speaker. Can you imagine the situation in your own riding if that were to happen. You probably would not be sitting there today. All sorts of strange things could happen and you could be on the patronage bandwagon today, Mr. Speaker, looking for a position on the immigration and refugee board, or maybe on this Canada Industrial Relations Board. You would certainly deserve it, Mr. Speaker. You have been here long enough to prove that you are part of club Chrétien. I think you have earned enough membership points. You might even get to the Senate, I do not know.
In any event, in this group there are two Reform motions which obviously we support. There are two Bloc motions which we oppose. Members before me have indicated briefly why we would do that.
First the Bloc wants to delete the clause in the bill which allows the CIRB to make decisions without oral hearings in fairly straightforward cases. We think it clogs the system if there is too much process. Therefore we are not supporting that particular motion.
The other one proposed by the Bloc has to do with the common practice where a group of employers will join forces to have just one agent represent them in negotiations. The amendment from the Bloc removes the requirement that the board must satisfy itself that the employer representative is no longer qualified to act in that capacity before revoking the appointment. The Bloc amendment provides for the automatic removal of the employer representative upon receipt of an application from one or more of the employers in the group and the appointment of a new representative.
We believe that there should be a vote of the majority of the members in this employer's group before such an action is taken. We really feel that the Bloc motion would weaken the employer's association position if they could just have one employer come along and the same sort of lack of process that we are talking about on the union side would suddenly be appearing on the employer side as well.
That deals with my comments on the Group No. 2 motions. I realize you probably need to take a break soon, Mr. Speaker, but I hope you are back in time for my speech on the Group No. 3 motions.