Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a couple of points with particular regard to the comments by the hon. member who just spoke in support of her private members' bill.
First of all, I would take some exception that this is about having or not having a social conscience. Frankly, this is very clearly an issue about labour relations. To suggest that because a member on this side of the House, or of another party, does not support this means that somehow we do not have a social conscience is not an acceptable remark.
This is clearly about the relationship between Canada and the provinces. The Minister of Labour in the province of Quebec has introduced a bill that this one mirrors. In fact, this one is drawn primarily from that bill. It is Bill 67 in the province of Quebec. I understand the minister in that province held a number of public consultations where people, including young people, gave their advice and opinions on this bill.
The minister has admitted that she was unable to arrive at a consensus within her own province of Quebec, yet she is going ahead with introducing it into the national assembly. I presume that is because there are fundamentally only two parties of strength in the legislature and it will carry. I assume that Mr. Bouchard's government will pass this into law. This is a provincial labour issue they are dealing with and they have every right to do that within the rights and the boundaries of their particular jurisdiction.
I find it strange though that a member of the Bloc would stand and say that because this is good for her province that this should necessarily expand to be good for all Canadians. It is quite an unusual day to see a separatist defending anything outside the borders of the province of Quebec. I have some difficulty with the rationale that somehow this should be good for all of Canada. In fact, this is gerrymandering and political manipulation with the socialists who are obviously chirping away and who are obviously in bed with the separatists. So we have the socialists and the separatists, the separatists and the socialists, together once again. Philosophically I understand that. I know where they come from. They believe that all the collective bargaining and contracts should be done by mother state as opposed to allowing the collective bargaining process to work.
That is fundamentally the difference of philosophy between this side, the government, the NDP, and in this case the Bloc. The Bloc members are fundamentally socialists.
I will talk about my dad who the member went on about. My father, when he was national director of the United Steelworkers of America, in all of Canada by the way, negotiated an agreement with Inco in Sudbury. He negotiated a seven year collective bargaining agreement, the longest collective bargaining agreement in history. That agreement put into place the protections that were necessary for the employees of the day and for new hires who came along as the seven year process expanded.
I wonder what people like Bill Mahoney or Larry Sefton would say about the parliament of Canada telling the unions and the union leaders, who are duly elected by the rank and file of their union, who have a mandate given to them by the men and women who are in that union, what they should do to protect the men and women in their union. Not only people like my father and Larry Sefton, but I think of old time, hard working union leaders like Joe Morris, Dennis McDermott and Johnny Barker from Sault Ste. Marie, who had a great saying. The socialists will love this. Johnny used to say, “Don't let your bleeding heart run away with your bloody head”. I always thought it was a classic. Johnny understood that if there was not a plant in Sault Ste. Marie that was functioning and creating steel products, there would not be jobs for the members. Johnny understood that this was not a sector of society where the government should be sticking its palmy, greedy little fingers. Allow the union leaders and the executives who work in the industrial part of this country to come together and to work out agreements that make sense.
While I am on that subject, the labour movement is big business. We think about it in terms of being a union. Let me tell the members it is big business.
When I was 16 years old I drove the getaway car for my dad when we went to Sudbury with the steelworkers leading the raid on mine mill. Why? We wanted to get the communists the heck out of the labour movement. There were too many of them infiltrated in the mine mill and we wanted to get them out. We needed a getaway driver because it was dangerous stuff.
It was scary stuff. They attempted to assassinate him on a couple of occasions. There were brawls in the hall of the President Hotel in Sudbury. There were police in the streets. It was violent stuff, and I did not understand. I said “Dad, what the heck are you doing this for?” I did not understand what he was doing. I thought this was a lot of scary stuff and I would rather be back home in Toronto, in Etobicoke, in my comfortable home than up here with all these tough mine workers and steel workers and all the fighting and everything else.
Do the hon. members know what it was about? It was about money. Let me tell the members why. I did not know it then, but the mine mill people were paying monthly dues into their union and so were the steelworkers. We had two unions, both negotiating directly with the company in Sudbury. They were negotiating. One would get a deal, then the other one would come in and say “I want a better deal” and the other one would come in and say “I want to one-up those guys”. There were conflicts. There were more fights between the unions in Sudbury in those days than there ever were between the company and the union.
It is really interesting to hear the NDP members going on. They have no understanding of the relationship, the positive, the pragmatic relationship that could be developed between a pragmatic labour leader representing the constituents, not walking around saying “I am vice-president of the New Democratic Party. Hear me roar”. What a bunch of nonsense.
NDP members should ask themselves a question. If all people in the labour movement are socialist, how come those guys never get any votes? How come the New Democratic Party does not form a government? How do we elect federal Liberals in Sault Ste. Marie and Oshawa? How do we do that? How do we elect, God forbid, provincial Tories in places like that?
The NDP have to get elected somewhere. NDP members have to get a job somewhere. I understand that. We know that they are in trouble. They have gone from two, and what are they up to, half a dozen or a dozen or whatever it is. Joe who? Joe what?
It is really an interesting thing. Why is it that the people in the labour movement in Windsor—think about it, Windsor—why do they not elect New Democratic Party members? I do not know. They have even tried getting together to do strategic voting and they get thrown out of office. Maybe they should understand that the men and women who work in the industrial heartland of this country have the same problems that we all have. They want to put their kids through school. Their VISA bill is about to explode. Christmas is coming and they have to find the money to buy gifts for their families.
They are concerned about their future. They are concerned about their pensions. They are not concerned about political manipulating and gerrymandering by any level of government to interfere in what is a true, great democratic process in this country called collective bargaining. It works. We should support collective bargaining and we should stick to what we need to do as a government which, I would say to the hon. member opposite, is to keep this country united as the greatest country in the world in which to live.