Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my hon. colleague for Kings—Hants.
I agree with almost every thing the member for Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore said. What the government has done today in the House is absolutely unforgivable, unconscionable and should not be allowed to happen in a democracy.
It is a pleasure, in one way, to be here today to see the government acknowledge it has failed miserably on two fronts. It has failed in managing the House of Commons, the Parliament of Canada. The government House leader has come in today with a bill that basically shuts down the rights of all of us as parliamentarians. This does not give us the right to have adequate debate. It does not give us a chance to reasonably explain to each other and the people of Canada why we are for or against any given piece of legislation.
When the government brings in closure it is acknowledging that it cannot run this place properly, it has failed to manage the affairs of the House of Commons. As a result the government takes away the rights of individual members in order to ram through legislation which obviously is only favoured by the government, not by any of the opposition members and not by the majority of Canadians.
The other area in which the Liberal government has failed is how it manages public relations, relations with its employees and how it runs its collective agreements. In effect what the President of the Treasury Board is saying today is he has failed. He was not able to negotiate a reasonable and fair settlement with the lowest paid of the Canadian public servants. To have the minister come in here today and acknowledge that is at least something to say that the Liberals know when they have done something wrong.
Unfortunately what we are seeing here today is a government, its slim majority achieved with only 38% of Canadian public support, using its bullying power to pass legislation whether Canadians like it or not.
We should not be here today just to do the government's dirty business. We should be here to discuss the problems facing Canada. One of those is the PSAC strike. What we are really doing here is getting the government off the hook because it is incompetent, uncaring and unaware of how to reach a reasonable settlement with its employees.
We should take some brief moments today, with the small amount of time we are allocated under this closure motion, to talk about what collective bargaining is supposed to be in Canada. Government is not supposed to be in the House of Commons today changing a rule to suit itself. It is here for the good of the people.
When it suspends collective bargaining, which in effect is what Bill C-76 does, it says that people do not have a right to go on strike. This PSAC strike, as far as I understand it, is a legal strike. They as employees, part of a collective bargaining unit, have every right to strike. They pay their union dues. They use negotiating teams to negotiate a good agreement for themselves. If those things do not work then obviously they have the provision to strike.
The employer, on the other hand, has the provision to lock out any employee who does not have a collective agreement. In this case these workers, the lowest paid in the Canadian public service, who have not had a wage increase for seven years, have chosen to go on strike. To my way of thinking they have every legal right to do so. For us to be here today to vote to suspend that right, to take away their collective bargaining right, is simply not proper.
We are doing it for a reason, there supposedly being a real crisis in western Canada. My thought process is if we have employees who are deemed essential, the minute they go on strike everyone knows the collective bargaining process. Some respect it and some do not. Basically in a collective bargaining process employees will choose to go on strike at a time that is most opportune for them, where they can exert more influence, where they can put more pressure on the employer to reach an acceptable agreement. Obviously that has happened in western Canada.
If employees are so essential that we cannot possibly do without them, that their service must be performed at all cost and at all times, then we should change the process. We should do away with collective agreements for some employees and take away the right to strike. Because they are essential, because they are deemed absolutely crucial to the governance of our country, then we should not have collective agreements but a system of binding arbitration where workers give up the right to strike on one hand knowing that a binding arbitration clause or agreement will be struck on the other hand that gives them a fair shake.
Not all governments follow this process exactly. In Newfoundland we have a most unfortunate situation now where we have taken the right to strike away from our policemen and firemen. Why did we take the right to strike away from policemen and firemen? They are deemed to be essential to good governance. They are deemed to be crucial to how our communities handle the affairs that come up on any given day.
Police in Newfoundland went to binding arbitration, so they thought, except they found that the Liberal Government of Newfoundland, with the same heavy hand that the Liberal government in Ottawa uses, would not accept the binding arbitration and in effect put in place an agreement which nobody, including the arbitrators, agreed with. That is government for government sake. It is not government for the people.
This whole situation we are in with PSAC puts farmers on one hand against PSAC members on the other. I again believe that if these workers, the grain handlers in particular, are absolutely essential to the agriculture industry in Canada, they are absolutely essential for our foreign trade purposes, then they could be declared an essential service. Make them eligible for binding arbitration and send them back to work.
If we were here today to discuss legislation which would change the collective bargaining agreement to deem those persons as performing an essential service, to give them binding arbitration, I suspect most of those members in that union would be more than happy to go back to work and do that essential service for the good of Canada.
What we have now is a crisis in the grain handling in the agricultural industry in western Canada and in effect what this government is doing is using the farmers, the producers of the country, as a form of blackmail to force some of their low paid workers not back to the bargaining table but simply back to work. I think that is absolutely shameful of the government. It is shameful to think that we would use our hardworking farmers to force some other low paying Canadians back to work.
I know there is tremendous concern for our international trade reputation. There is the tremendous concern of money loss, of contracts in place, of delivery schedules not being met, but it is the government's fault. Farmers in western Canada may think the Government of Canada is doing them a favour by legislating workers back to their duties. Most farmers will say it is the fault of the Government of Canada and not the low paid PSAC workers who are at fault here.
If the Government of Canada thinks it will curry favour with all the farmers across the country, I certainly hope that does not happen because it does not deserve any credit from the farmers of Canada.
Certainly Treasury Board and the government have known for over two years that these negotiations had to take place. Why were there only 14 days of negotiations with a collective bargaining unit over a 2 year period? Is this good planning and good management by the government? Obviously it is not.
I agree that in certain cases people may have to be legislated back to work because they are essential. If the marine Atlantic ferry workers connecting Newfoundland to the rest of the country were to go on strike it might be that because it was destroying the fishing industry and completely disrupting the tourism industry those people might have to be legislated back to work.
My thought process is again the same as it is with these workers, that they are deemed essential. Give them binding arbitration. They lose their right to strike but it is known that in the end there will at least be a fair agreement and it will not have to be done by blackmailing some other part of society.
One of the very important issues for Atlantic Canada, in particular for Newfoundland, is the regional rates of pay. This is another Liberal policy that allows for a Newfoundlander doing exactly the same work as somebody from Calgary or Vancouver to get a different rate of pay. It is absolutely unconstitutional. It is unfair.
It is not allowed to discriminate based on race, creed or colour but there can be discrimination based on where one happens to live. It is absolutely, totally unfair and PSAC is fighting this battle. It is a battle that needs to be won. It is a policy that needs to be changed by the Government of Canada.
It is silliness to think that the Government of Canada is afraid to disrupt local labour markets because of paying a higher rate of pay in Newfoundland. In Newfoundland we lost 30,000 people in the last three years. We have a 20% unemployment rate and a 35% unemployment rate with young people.
I assure the President of the Treasury Board and the Prime Minister and all his ministers in cabinet that there would be no disruption of the labour market in Newfoundland if the government paid these people a fair wage.
I hope that somewhere in this whole process some of these PSAC members are able to fight this battle on regional rates of pay and come to a logical conclusion which is that everybody in Canada who does the same work for the Government of Canada should get the same rate of pay.