Mr. Speaker, I no longer ask for that consent. I would like to speak my full time.
We are debating Bill C-76, an act to provide for the resumption and continuation of government services. The short title is cited as being the government services act, 1999.
Tonight we have had amendments in committee of the whole to put in place the tentative agreement that was announced tonight by the President of the Treasury Board between the government and the table two blue collar workers of the PSAC union.
I would like to note that we have had the bill along with a booklet setting out the details and the wages that are part of the back to work legislation. We attempted to get the details of the tentative agreement which is now part of Bill C-76. However, we were unable to get them tabled in the House even though we are expected to debate those very provisions. It is not particularly fun or appropriate to have to debate something when we do not have the exact facts in front of us, but we will debate what we have.
Bill C-76 is in two parts. The first part deals with the operational groups. Being the chief critic for agriculture, the one I am particularly concerned with is the grain weighers at the west coast ports. The second part deals with the corrections workers in our federal penitentiaries who are not designated essential.
Tonight we came to debate this back to work legislation in good faith and with good intentions. But tonight the government handled the issue of the surprise announcement of the tentative agreement in much the same way that I believe it has handled the negotiations with the unions over the past three months, with confusion, a lack of complete facts, and a spinning of the facts which left no trust and no faith in the process.
Back in 1993 when the Liberals took over as a majority government, many workers across the country were in a wage freeze. They knew at that time that the wage freeze would end. In 1997 the Public Service Alliance of Canada gave notice that bargaining would be taking place.
At that time it would seem to me that it would be incumbent upon the negotiators, and I guess the ministers responsible for the negotiations, to set a timetable to ensure a bargaining agreement was in place at the expiry of the wage freeze. That would have had the advantage of there not being a strike because there would have been an agreement.
If there was no agreement and a sensible and reasonable timetable had been set out by the treasury board minister, he could have looked at back to work legislation at a much earlier point.
We ended up with a whole lot of innocent third party Canadians seriously being harmed by the negligence of the government to get the agreement in place and by the fault of a certain number of union negotiators not to work in conjunction with the government. I said earlier that if I were to apportion blame I would probably put about 75% on the government and 25% on the union.
Let us talk about what has happened in the past with regard to grain exports and the agriculture sector as it relates to stoppages due to wage negotiations. In the last 26 years there have been 12 work stoppages at west coast ports. We could think about that for a minute. Almost every two years there is a stoppage in grain movement to the coast.
We must remember that every time there is a stoppage of grain movement to the ships going to our customers overseas it costs our farmers money. It costs the union people who have to go out on strike pay and it hurts our reliability.
This year the Canadian Wheat Board has exports of a little over 50% of what they were a year ago. We are seeing the cumulative effect of our grain sales being considered unreliable to our customers overseas. We cannot apply a dollar and cents figure to that very easily. However we could look at the sales of our competitors, the Americans for instance, which are down only about 10% as compared to ours being down close to 50%.
Of the 12 work stoppages we see that 9 of them involved grain and 7 of those involved back to work legislation specifically because of grain stoppages. Both the Sims commission and the west coast port inquiry identified grain disruptions as a catalyst for back to work legislation in labour disputes at west coast ports.
I do not happen to have the chronology of the House as to who was in power over the different years, but I happen to know they involved the Right Hon. Lester Pearson, the Right Hon. Pierre Trudeau and the Right Hon. John Diefenbaker who came from my home province and was just one fine fellow.
This situation should not have been any surprise to the government sitting here today in 1999. There are 26 years of history. I look at the other side of the House and I know there are members over there who have been here for at least 28 to 30 years. I believe the Prime Minister has something like a 34 year record. If the leader on the other side cannot remember the harm, the damage and the tremendous number of stoppages of grain movement to the west coast, there is no hope of a negotiated wage settlement being done in a proper manner, on schedule, and in time to prevent the harm and the hurt by farmers.
The Western Grain Elevator Association is representative of Sask Pool, Agricore, a new grain company out west, United Grain Growers and Cargill. These grain company foresaw major problems with their exports of non-wheat board grains and wheat board grains that they were handling on behalf of the board.
On January 27, 1999 they sent a letter to the treasury board minister and to the Prime Minister identifying that a big dark cloud was looming on the horizon, a cloud of disruption, a cloud of trade and losses to farmers, and a cloud of loss of exports of grain in particular. I do not think the government bothered reading that letter too much because it went ahead with its negotiating plan which resulted in the mess we see here today.
Along with my colleagues I had to force the government into an emergency debate to get this movement going. What did we see? We saw trickery on the part of the government up to the very last moment when it brought in a surprise tentative agreement at a late hour.
The treasury board president tonight in committee of the whole identified that he would consider the possibilities of doing an investigation and determining what were the actual costs to farmers as a result of the loss of exports during the strike by grain weighers. We should hold him to that. Can we imagine the billions of dollars in loss over the last 26 years, not thousands or millions, that my grandfather and my father and the grandfathers and fathers of many people in the House suffered due to a lack of action by governments of the day? The disappointment is that the present government cannot learn from the mistakes of the past, some of which were committed by present sitting members, I might point out.
Who will pay for the losses of these farmers? When we look at the Canadian Wheat Board and its loss of sales due to the snow storms of 1996-997, we see that the Canadian Wheat Board went after the railways. It negotiated a settlement with CN. We will never know how much it got. Then later it achieved a $15 million settlement with CPR because farmers were innocent third parties. The railways saw fit to move products and commodities other than grain and gave preference to commodities like coal, sulphur and whatever. As a result there was a liability on behalf of the railroads to the wheat board and therefore to farmers. Tomorrow and on future days I will be calling upon the wheat board and the government to identify the costs to farmers and to compensate them for those losses.
The government brought forth the agriculture income disaster assistance plan. The agriculture minister bears full responsibility for that plan which went out to farmers. We found from the initial reaction of farmers who filled out those forms that the plan would not help them very much when it came to financial compensation.