Madam Speaker, it is with a degree of sadness that I rise today to speak to Bill C-78. I believe that many members of the House, including members on the government side, share this sense of remorse for the process in which we are participating. We feel very badly that we are participating in what effectively, and let us be candid about it, is a parliamentary charade. Canadians can watch this on CPAC. Somehow, in some way, the government is trying to demonstrate that there is legitimate parliamentary debate on important public policy issues, in this case Bill C-78, which is a 200 page bill, a complicated piece of legislation which affects all Canadian public servants and entails remarkable changes, sweeping changes, relative to $100 billion ultimately.
Canadians may, in watching this, actually believe that there has been legitimate debate. I would like to inform Canadians who may be watching that there has not been legitimate debate. The government has railroaded this through parliament, through the committee process, through the House and has utilized closure again. The government has, at an unprecedented rate, used the instrument of closure to railroad legislation through parliament. It has not allowed the committee to effectively study this important piece of legislation.
The government claims that the main purpose of the legislation is to improve the financial management of the financial sector pension funds and the superannuate funds of the federal public servants, RCMP and military. Keep in mind that the average annual pension for these individuals is around $9,000 per year. These are not fat cats we are talking about. They are very average Canadians.
We should be sceptical whenever the government claims to have the interest of public servants at heart, particularly if we look at the record of the government on public servants. Sunday's Ottawa Citizen said that the Treasury Board president “has clobbered public servants harder than any cabinet minister in Canada's history”.
The politics of attacking public servants is similar to the politics of attacking politicians. It is very easy to attack a group that may not be particularly popular with the public because of misperceptions, or to make gratuitous attacks on the banking sector which the government has been willing to do.
It is very cynical that the government would use in a political sense any tool it has to attack groups that may not be incredibly popular but are groups that have legitimate causes and claims. For the government to play a very dangerous and cynical political game of pitting one group of Canadians against another simply for political expediency and political palatability is atrocious.
The government has eliminated 55,000 federal jobs, has frozen wages, has eliminated job security from the public service and has appealed the pay equity ruling in opposition to Liberal Party policy. I think it was a red book promise. It is a government that continues to use heavy-handed back to work legislation and suspends binding arbitration. This is the same Liberal Party that under the leadership of Lester Pearson introduced collective bargaining to the public service 30 years ago.
The current government leaders and the Prime Minister are being the patron saints of hypocrisy in backtracking on every major tenet of not just Liberal policy, but also of the fundamentals of fairness we value as Canadians.
It is the government that introduced back to work legislation to end a strike of 14,000 blue collar workers. Again, these are not high income workers within the public service. The government maintained the policy of regional rates of pay and a ghettoization of public servants. It introduced the back to work legislation without proper debate and sought closure.
The President of the Treasury Board reached a tentative agreement with the public servants and withheld that information from parliament before a crucial vote. That night he snookered the Reform Party. Unwittingly the Reform Party supported the back to work legislation because the government had pitted the interests of one group against another, in this case the grain farmers and the grain industry in the west against the interests of blue collar public servants.
Again that was cynical. It was an abuse of the parliamentary process and an abuse of members of parliament that should not only offend the Reform Party members, and I am sure it does, but it should also offend members of parliament on the government side of the House who watched that night and who participated in the vote without the proper information.
The level of morale in the public service is at an all-time low. While Canadian corporations are pursuing innovative labour-management and human resources management policies, the government is continuing to attack the public service and ignore the fact that the public sector represents 40% of the Canadian economy.
I see some hon. members present who serve on the finance committee with me. We are studying the issue of productivity. When 40% of our economy is public sector and the government has created a level of morale that has never been lower within the public service, I would argue that we have a productivity issue within our public service. This government through its continued gratuitous attacks on the public service has had a significant deleterious effect on the morale and the productivity of the federal public service. It has impacted the growth and future prosperity of Canadians in doing so.
The only group this government has demonstrated more contempt for besides public servants is members of parliament in this House. The government is persistent in its propensity to use closure and to railroad legislation through committees and through this House without legitimate and important public policy debate. Committees are being operated as branch plants of the ministers' offices. Government members are told to pass bills but not really discuss them. There is no objective, constructive development of public policy as there should be and at a time when public policy and the challenges facing us are very complex.
There has been a secular decline in the role of the MP which has occurred over a 30 year period. This decline has occurred at a precipitous level under this government.
With this legislation the government is failing to follow its own guidelines set out in S-3, the pension benefits standards act for the private sector. It sets out guidelines for the private sector and for private sector employers which the government itself is unwilling to use. Why is it doing that? Because it wants to get its hands on that $30 billion surplus.
The government would tell Canadians that that money is being applied to the debt. Keep in mind, in some ways it is a theoretical number; it is just a paper shift. The fact is that the government has not done anything to better Canadians by taking that from one group and putting it against the national debt.
The government has done something it believes to benefit itself politically. Come the next election the government will claim credit and say that it reduced the debt by the figure of $30 billion when it has not. Public servants through their pensions and their sacrifices, work and contributions over the years have provided the ability for the government to have that surplus and the government is taking that in a very cynical way.
I have said cynical several times. I feel very cynical today to be participating in this process where the government is again pitting the Canadian public against the public service, creating more division in a country that needs more unity. We should be working particularly in a post-deficit and a surplus environment to rebuild our relationships as parliamentarians and as government with the public service.
The Federal Superannuates National Association, the FSNA, has done a very good job on this, as have other organizations. The federal superannuates were effective in their lobby against the seniors benefit package which through clawbacks would have reduced pension benefits for seniors.
This government is not focused on creating better prosperity for Canadians. This government is focused solely on the next election and not on the next century. This treatment of parliament and of public servants has to end.