Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At this time of the night I need that kind of affirmation. Had I known I was going to be here at ten minutes after ten debating this tonight I would not have worked until twenty after one this morning.
This is a very important issue. We are talking about cash flow for farmers. We are talking about the delivery of grain. We are talking about the sale of grain which brings their income. These are the farmers who, as I was saying when I was so kindly interrupted, are at large risk because they do not have the cash flow to sustain their operations.
I do not know whether there are many members in the House who have had that experience. I have. I grew up on a farm. My father bought it. It was really tough in the 1930s when he got into farming. There were a number of years when he had no income, and if it was not for the fact that we kids did not eat very much I think he would have gone bankrupt. We saved him, and hon. members can see that later on we made up for it. It is certainly true that it is very, very tough to be a farmer.
These farmers are now facing the cost of putting in their crops for the coming year. They just had notice that the cost of fuel is going up substantially. They have all sorts of crunches, and at the same time we have a small group of people who, because of this government's failure to reach a contract with them, feel that they are forced or obligated to hold rotating strikes to press their particular issue. This is so unfortunate. It comes at such a bad time.
As a matter of fact, I do not think there ever is a good time for a strike or a labour conflict. It really is better if we can work together, bargain in good faith, come to agreements and motor on.
About 20 years ago a friend and I had a little business. It happened to be a dairy business. We had about 50 cows, or a little more, and we milked them morning and night, seven days a week. We never took Christmas Day or Easter off because when one has a dairy operation it demands one's attention every day, without fail. Whether one is sick or not, it does not matter; one has to look after the cows or they will not maintain their health. They need to be milked every day.
What happened? There was a strike at the dairy which picked up our milk. Suddenly, just like that, the truck did not come to empty our big chrome-plated tank of milk every day. We ended up putting 5,000 gallons of milk down the drain every other day. We lost our income and we really had a tough time. It set us back fantastically. It was simply because they did not have an agreement. It was a tremendous hit for us.
We have an obligation to each other. Often we hear in the House, particularly from the Liberals that we are such a compassionate society. I agree. We need to work very hard and care for and look after each other. There are times when we are in conflict. Sometimes our rights conflict and collide with the rights of others and desperately so.
I know it is essentially impossible to reach but there should be times when labour unions and others say, “We know we are entitled to this but we cannot let these other people down and put them at risk to that extent”. I think that is a breakdown. Right now I am putting the blame on the unions but I am also putting the blame on the employer, in this case the Government of Canada.
I had a great meeting with one of the PSAC members last Saturday. I am told it is their opinion that the government has not bargained in good faith. They have some requests, some demands, some positions they want in their new contract and the government is just saying nyet. The government is refusing. By the way, for the translator who needs to put it into English, nyet is Russian. The government is saying it will not do it.
The union wants to have the same salary for the different classifications across Canada or at least some move toward that. That does not seem to be terribly unreasonable to me. As the hon. member opposite has said, the government did move partially toward that. Perhaps it is part of a process. Maybe the unions should be a little more patient and say that it got a little bit this time and next time it will get a little more.
It is a required process. We need to consider what our actions mean to others. This Liberal government has to think of what this action means. It has already talked about the implications for thousands of Canadians who are waiting for their income tax refunds. The government needs to think very hard about what this means to the prairie grain farmers. We have emphasized it so much in the last four or five months. It has been a tremendously difficult crunch for them.
There is an attachment to the land. When one farms the same property, as my family has done now for over 60 years, one gets very close to the soil. I often think that I can empathize with the natives of our country who identify with the land. Some of us come to this part of the country, we cover it with concrete and asphalt and we do not get close to the land.
My dad is 87 years old and he still gets excited every time the harvest comes off. He still goes out every day to the farm during seeding and harvesting to see how the boys are doing and what is going on. He would love to drive the tractor but unfortunately with the huge equipment nowadays that is not always possible because it takes considerable skill. He has a great interest in this. It is devastating to families, to people like my brother and my dad, to even contemplate that their business operation is so threatened that they may lose what is theirs and what they have worked for, for now into the third generation.
I want to share an experience I had. I have indicated many times in the House that I worked as a mathematics instructor at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. In 1982 the institute went from being governed by the government directly to being operated by a board of governors. My colleagues honoured me by electing me as the founding chairman of the staff association. My responsibilities were to get the organization up and running, build a constitution that worked and all those things. We also had our first collective agreement.
As a matter of fact after serving for five years, my gift, my token, my memento of that five years of service was a beautiful work of wood art. One of the members of our woodworking section handcrafted a copy of the first collective agreement with our signatures on it. That sits on our coffee table with great pride.
I want to say something about that first agreement. Before we were under a board of governors, we were forced members of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees. As professional staff, most of us would have chosen not to be under that union but we were obligated because we were civil servants of the province of Alberta. We did not like some of the things that happened. We thought that the union was sometimes unresponsive to us. When we formed our own staff association, we said one of the things that we were going to solve right at the beginning was the problem of dispute resolution.
There are two levels of dispute resolution when it comes to labour agreements. One is the ongoing one, where members who are under the collective agreement feel that they are not being treated fairly under the terms of that agreement. That usually yields a grievance or some other mechanism to try to solve that difference of opinion. The other area in which there is room for the correction of a disagreement is the negotiation process itself.
When an agreement cannot be reached in negotiations and hence an agreement cannot be signed, the old-fashioned way in Canada and in much of the western world is for the unions to withhold their services. They go on strike and force the hand of the other side.
In the case of industrial businesses and manufacturing plants there is a tremendous economic loss to the employer. In the case of educators, there is usually a gain to the employers when the employees go on strike. The employers save the money of the salaries when the employees are on strike and invariably the students catch up on their studies later on.
We argued that because we were in an educational institute, it was to the advantage of the employer if we went on strike and it did not force the employer's hand so could we come up with something better. I am very proud to say, and I think I had some leadership influence, that some very fine people worked on that original collective agreement. One of them was a guy by the name of Percy Bell. There were others as well but Percy in particular really leaned into the problem.
In our first collective agreement we had a provision that took away our right to strike. Many people in the union camp would say that was a huge error, but the fact is it was done by mutual consent. It was not forced by one side. We were able to persuade our members that under that regime we would be better off than if we were to have the right to strike.
We built into our collective agreement a very rigid process for resolution of a dispute at the time of contract negotiations. It was right down to the day. I do not remember the details but we said that so many days before the expiry of the contract each party had to present their opening positions, which clauses of the contract they wanted to open. Two weeks later they would give their positions on those contracts. There was a time line for arranging for meetings. There was a time line on how frequently those meetings could be held when people were named to meet and so on. It was all spelled out in the agreement.
I am proud to announce that it worked very well, at first. Now I will drop the bombshell. For the most part over the years the Government of Alberta has been a good government. Unfortunately, the government threw a monkey wrench into this process. We usually had a collective agreement before the old one expired. We would come to an agreement. There was no arbitration. There was no mediation, but when it finally came to that, we had the time lines set out for naming a mediator and the mediator's decision was binding and final. It was all spelled out.
What happened was the Alberta government made a mistake. It passed into its labour legislation a little clause that said that in the event that an arbitrator or a mediator is required to make a decision on a collective agreement, he is required to take into account government policy. That annoyed me because it totally skewed and really nullified a very good process.
What happened was that before the negotiations began, the government would simply make an announcement. For example, it would simply say that this year its policy was no raises more than 2%. We then knew that if we ever went into arbitration we would get 2% because the arbitrator was obligated to take into account that government policy.
That was a very unwise decision because it took away from the process the element of fairness which makes it trustworthy.
I wish we could do that with the post office and with PSAC. I wish we had a better way of resolving a dispute in the final agreement than simply clawing at each other with the power of strikes and all of the bad feelings that generates, the impasses which are brought along and the tremendous implications to so many innocent bystanders, like the farmers or the people waiting for their income tax refunds. It is long overdue.
I am very proud to say that one of the reasons I like the Reform Party and its policies is that in our policy for labour management we are promoting the idea of final offer binding arbitration. It is a mechanism which I am absolutely convinced will work because I have been in an environment where it did work.
I emphasize that it needs to be brought into being by consensus and not by a forced vote. A convincing case needs to be put forward to both sides that they would be better off under that regime than under a strike regime. If they buy into it and accept it, then it will work because the parties will be amenable to it. If they have agreed to it, they will make it work. If it is imposed on them, they will not.
I am so dead set against the high-handed government imposing its will on workers and other citizens simply by pulling the string of a majority government. It is wrong, anti-democratic and does not serve the best needs of Canadians.
When we come to the vote, we are asking to get the show on the road. I regret to say this but unfortunately I think it is necessary to get these people back to work while we solve this problem. However, I for one am not going to rest until we have a long term solution so we do not have this problem recurring over and over again. There is a better way.