Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Motions No. 9 and 28 introduced by the Reform Party member, because they are related.
I think that the best way of understanding the doublespeak too often characteristic of legislation and officialdom is to read the explanatory notes provided by the government.
What we are to take from Motion No. 9 is that, because of the problems caused by the airline industry's practice of awarding successive contracts for pre-board security screening services, Transport Canada concluded, in 1988, an agreement with Canadian to protect the salaries and benefits of employees when pre-board security screening services were put out to tender. This is the policy that is codified in law.
The bill adds that it will be possible to extend the application of this provision to other sectors of activity that might, of course, be designated by regulations made by the governor in council. This has to do with the whole idea of the privatization of certain public services. Members know how popular this is right now.
It is the matter of the continuity of existing collective agreements, that is the improved general working conditions employees have managed to acquire over years, very often decades, of labour relations, particularly with respect to wages. This is what the Reform Party wants to lay open to question again.
This is most unfortunate, in our opinion, because these are social gains which have enabled us to live in what can be described as a civilized society, benefiting from the gains acquired by the labour movement at the cost of great struggle, and we must not forget this. Those gains have led to a more just society, at least in certain areas.
The Reform motion lays all of this open to question again, as it refuses to acknowledge the previous contractor, or in other words the obligation of the new contractor to provide employees with the same benefits they received before.
The Reform Party is also subtly challenging the board's ability to intervene. In order to be consistent with its own rather sneaky attack against the low wage earners, against unionized workers, it says that the board ought not to have the power to intervene under section 47.3, which deals with the previous contractor.
It wants this to be removed, which would mean the board could no longer invoke section 47.3, which applies to contractors and allows the board to require the party against which a complaint has been filed—since there is a right to file a complaint if one feels one is not being properly treated by a new contractor—to cease to contravene these requirements.
As a result of eliminating section 47.3 and the possibility of intervention if such cases do occur when there is more privatization as a result of increased deregulation and government withdrawal from certain areas, this will prevent the board from being able to order the employer to pay employees an amount equivalent to, or in excess of, the amount they would have been paid by the employer if there had not been a violation.
This gives a very good idea of the sort of mentality to be found in the official opposition, within this so-called reform party, which reforms from underneath, widens the gap between the rich and the poor and delights in the monstrous profits made by private industry, where there is no requirement to be accountable, except to the shareholders. They are almost congratulating themselves on the widening gap between the rich and the poor. They want to bring everyone down to the same level. They challenge such commendable things as unions. They challenge them instead of recognizing them.
The working conditions of the honest worker are at stake. This is what is being challenged by those who have a say, who polish their halos as they bend parliamentary procedures, as we have seen recently, and they are doing this on the backs of low income Canadians.
We must decry this with our very last breath, because, in the end, workers' dignity is at issue. The aim is to make the biggest profits with the lowest expenditure on the backs of the employees. This was curbed in the evolution of societies through the intervention of unions and the arrival of social programs. It was regulated somewhat. In today's neo-liberal context, there are lawyers of their ilk who defend the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, and I think it is our job to criticize them.