Mr. Speaker, very simply, in the time that is left, while I applaud the initiative of the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre, his bill certainly does not work as intended.
The bill proposes to eliminate section 13(5) in order to put the independent mail contractors in the union. However, the essential words of that clause are “a mail contractor is deemed not to be a dependent contractor or an employee”. We can substitute “mail contractor” for “independent contractor is deemed not to be a dependent contractor”.
If we eliminate this section, it will not change anything. It is one of these sections that get into legislation every now and then for political reasons. In fact, Canada Post, whether or not that section exists, will retain the right to hire independent contractors as it does now and as it will in the future. While I applaud the hon. member's good intentions, I assure him that his bill will not achieve what he is setting out to do.
I will say, however, that I am a great supporter of private members' business and I am very glad that the hon. member brought this bill forward. As the member for Kelowna said, there is no doubt there are grave injustices being done in the way contracts are being negotiated with our rural mail carriers.
The real problem is not a matter of whether they are in or out of a union. The real problem is with Canada Post itself. It is a body that is neither fish nor fowl. It is not a business, yet it is an arm of government. If it conducted itself as a business, indeed if we privatized Canada Post, it would have to conduct good business practices in a spirit of transparency that does not exist now. We cannot see how Canada Post operates. We would find that it would have to bend to good market practices and I would expect that it would negotiate contracts with these rural mail carriers in a decent and orderly manner.