Mr. Speaker, I can honestly say, without any fear of contradiction, that in my own personal life this is the most important piece of legislation that I have had the opportunity to debate.
From my background as a blue collar construction worker and as a journeyman carpenter by trade, it has always been of major interest to me that all Canadians have the basic right to a clean, healthy and safe working environment; that no Canadian gets up in the morning to go to work to die; that they get up to go to work to earn a living. They deserve to earn a living without the fear of unnecessary risk by the conditions in their workplace.
I am very pleased to be here today to talk about Bill C-12, the much ballyhooed and long awaited amendments to Part II of the Canada Labour Code. What we have in front of us today is the product of four long years of consultation, consensus building and of the development of ideas and recommendations that now manifest themselves in this very worthy bill.
The working group of labour, business and government tried its best to do everything by consensus. There was no majority vote on these issues. They worked it around the table in a spirit and atmosphere of true co-operation because they realized the nature of the work they were doing was so important and had such a direct impact on the lives of all those employees or Canadian workers governed by the Canada Labour Code.
The Canada Labour Code actually has jurisdiction over about 700,000 Canadian workers. This is nowhere near a majority of Canadian workers but it is certainly a significant number of Canadian workers, such that it can set a precedent and form a standard that all other labour relations jurisdictions should look to in terms of setting their own health and safety standards. That is what makes Bill C-12 so critical.
Obviously the employees of the federal government fall under the Canada Labour Code. Many are crown corporations, et cetera. Some fall under the Public Service Staff Relations Act. The work that we do here today and the work that we will do when the bill goes to committee has a direct bearing and a very important effect on the lives of many Canadians. It is critical and it is absolutely crucial.
I began by telling the House how I got interested in health and safety. It was through my own background. My first job as a kid growing up was to work in the asbestos mines in the Yukon, which is not a good career choice. I would not recommend it to anyone, frankly. The only reason I raise this is that at that time asbestos was not recognized as a hazardous material.
As young workers, we were there happily working with asbestos and earning a living. We asked our bosses if there was any truth to the rumour that this stuff was bad for us and they told us that it was a harmless, white, fireproof substance. They told us to continue shovelling it and that we should not worry about a thing.
It was not until our union finally started to get active, to do some research and caution us that were realized that the stuff was not only bad for us but that there was no safe level of asbestos. One part per billion in the air was too much. At that time we became aware that on those issues the union was the only friend a working person had because everyone else was lying to us in the name of profit and greed. That taught me a lesson when I was very young.
Later on in my work life I became a journeyman carpenter. I became very active in my union and became a shop steward for my union. A very big part of my job was to make sure our members were not put at risk by some arbitrary production schedule. As I have said before, there is no production schedule in the world that warrants or justifies putting people's lives at risk.
I can honestly say that I have dedicated much of my working life to trying to elevate the standards of working conditions in terms of workplace safety and health in this country. That is why I am so very gratified to stand here today and not only debate Bill C-12 but to actually recommend Bill C-12 with some minor amendments and modifications that I will be speaking about later. It is very gratifying for me to finally be here doing something that is in such a positive light for Canadian working people.
It was not that long ago that this really was not much of a priority for government or industry in the country. There was a sort of acceptance that some jobs are just inherently dangerous and some people are going to get hurt doing those dangerous jobs. We can no longer tolerate that mindset: (a) there is no reason for it, and (b) it is morally and ethically reprehensible to even contemplate that mindset.
As the chief job steward for the carpenters on a hydroelectric dam, I was very proud that our dam was the first hydro dam in all of Manitoba that was ever built without killing anyone. On previous hydro dams as many as seven people would be killed on the job. There was a saying in the carpentry trade that every building is a tombstone in a way because it was so normal to lose a couple of guys. Companies would actually factor that into their cost and into their productivity.
Thankfully, we have moved away from those days but it really was not that long ago. As I say, in the late seventies we really achieved something by building a dam without killing anyone. I put it to the House that there is no reason that anyone should be dying on the job. All of those accidents are preventable with the right measures, with the right legislation and with the right enforcement.
I do not really have to say anything more in this speech. I could just stand here and say enforcement, enforcement, enforcement for the next 20 minutes and that would be the most important single message that we could deliver to the labour relations community, employers and employees across the country. It is so critical.
In recent years, partly due to shortages of enforcement officers, we have been seeing more and more governments relying on what they call voluntary compliance orders. A voluntary compliance order, frankly, does not cut it, especially in the private sector where some people still view safety as a cost factor. Even though it is a terribly outdated and obsolete way of viewing things, some people still look at stopping to put up a guard rail as a non-productive activity. Where is the payback? It will slow us down and it will cost us money. It is a terrible way of doing things.
I will give the House some figures that will illustrate how wrong-headed that is. We all know the good, moral and ethical reasons why we do not want anyone hurt or killed at the workplace. Let me tell the House some of the economics of workplace safety and health.
In my home province of Manitoba, we lose about 50,000 person days a year to strikes, lockouts and labour unrest. It is a productivity issue. In the same period of time, we lost 550,000 person days per year to time lost due to accidents on the job. If we are so serious about elevating the levels of productivity for Canadian workers, we could clean up the workplaces, stop the carnage and save ourselves half a million person days a year in Manitoba alone.
Frankly, that does not factor in the other detail that we have looked at in the union movement, which is the secondary impact of a workplace accident. This means that when one of our colleagues is struck down, falls or is hurt, injured or killed on the job, there is a ripple effect throughout the whole workforce. Productivity is slow on the day of the accident and does not get up to full speed until many days later. I have seen that happen many times.
The whole concept of workplace safety and health legislation in this country is really geared around three things; the right to know, the right to refuse and the right to fully participate in the health and safety aspects of our workplace. Those three things define and shape what we would like to see as a healthy and safe work environment. The right to know means that we have the right to know what hazardous materials we might be working with. We do have WHMIS legislation, Workplace Hazardous Material Information System, in this country where any worker has the right to say “Are you sure this chemical I am using is not bad for me? Prove it to me”. The onus is on the employer to prove to the worker that it will not hurt them. If we had that kind of legislation when I worked in the asbestos mine, I would have quit a lot sooner than I did.
It is a very complex field and it needs at lot of administration to make it work. It is very complicated now. We cannot just train people in WHMIS for eight hours and then leave them alone. We are dealing with very complicated materials now. There are secondary things that go off with the materials we work with. This element might be benign and that element might be benign, but put the two together in our kidney and they turn into a third element that will kill us. We need to know that. We cannot send workers in unprotected and ask them to do that kind of thing for the sake of economics.
Canadians are more cognizant of the issue of workplace safety and health and the issue of people injured and killed on the job. The evidence of that is that we now recognize April 28 as the International Day of Mourning for Injured and Fallen Workers. I am proud to say that the flag at the House of Commons is lowered to half-mast. It is recognized officially by a motion passed in the House of Commons. Canadians are sympathetic, aware and will be pleased that we are taking these steps to pass Bill C-12 and make their workplace that much safer. I am proud to say that it was the former labour critic of the NDP, Rod Murphy, the member for Churchill, who moved the motion to make April 28 the day of mourning.
As I said, we think Bill C-12 has a great deal of merits. We wish it to go speedily through the House, but not unamended. We have to point out a number of things that are seriously lacking in this bill. I will go through them briefly.
Almost everything in Bill C-12 was dealt with by consensus building in the committee with FEDCO, the federal employers group for the employers, the Canadian Labour Congress Workplace Safety and Health Committee for the employees and the government at the table. However, sometimes the language in the bill does not accurately reflect the consensus made and recorded at the committee. In places where we saw a gap between what we thought was agreed to and what is in the bill, we had to ask for that to be clarified and amended.
In other cases, we felt that there were things that showed up in the bill that were never brought up at the table. They are very minor details but surely nothing in this bill should be seen for the first time by our side because it was supposed to be developed by this consensus building process.
We find fault with one of the details that is not exactly as it was agreed to at committee. We would like to see a two tier appeal system. The recommendation in Bill C-12 is that we go to a single person being involved in the appeal process. That person would be an appeals officer, not the Canada Industrial Relations Board. We feel that is like the fox looking after the hen house. If one has a grievance about the activities of the health and safety division, a health and safety division officer should not hear the appeal.
The second detail we find fault with is the definition of health. It may sound like we are nitpicking but frankly it is very important. Definitions are contained in the preamble. If our definition of a healthy workplace and the government's definition of a healthy workplace differ, we will have a lot of problems. We thought we agreed to use the definition of the World Health Organization as such. Until a letter from HRD on July 12, 1996, we thought we had a deal. That was arbitrarily changed by the government side and we would like to know why.
We find fault with the government's definition of health because it specifically excludes workplace stress as a physical disease, mental illness or compensable condition. We wholly disagree with that. We believe that workplace stress is a factor in a person's general health and must be included in the definition.
There has never been any complaint about stress due to traumatic events. If one witnesses a terrible tragedy in the workplace and is unable to work as a result, it is considered a compensable lost time condition because it was due to a trauma. We believe that workplace stress in general can also lead to that condition.
We find fault with article 126(1)(j). We call it the rat clause. Employees are obliged to inform on a colleague who they may feel is causing unsafe circumstances. The onus or the burden should not be placed on employees to rat on other employees. The matter can be brought to the attention of the employer but they do not have to rat on fellow workers. We want that changed.
Articles 126(1)(k) and 139(1) call for mandatory tests and medical examinations. Mandatory medical tests are now illegal under human rights law and international practice. Ontario has recently changed its law in this regard. Section 28(3) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, Revised Statutes of Ontario, 1990, reads:
A worker is not required to participate in a prescribed medical surveillance program unless the worker consents to do so.
We believe these two articles violate International Labour Organization technical and ethical guidelines for workers' health surveillance which was ratified by Canada in 1997.
Four conditions must be met for medical examinations in the workplace to be all right. First, they must be completely voluntary. Second, individual test results must be strictly confidential. Third, workers should have the right to choose the examining doctor. Fourth, there should be no cost whatsoever to the worker. Only under these conditions could we agree to have any kind of mandatory testing program or to contemplate it within the Canada Labour Code.
With regard to health and safety committee meetings, Bill C-12 calls for mandating nine such meetings per year. Our working committee believes that it should be twelve and that they should be monthly. That is what we should be shooting for.
Sometimes we do not get them all done. They have to be cancelled now and then, but at least we should set out to try to do it once a month. The single most important aspect to keeping a clean, healthy and safe work environment is the communication between labour and management. There must be a co-operative attempt to work toward a clean, safe and healthy work environment. Twelve would be the minimum.
There are provinces which already mandate that. British Columbia requires monthly meetings in its health and safety act.
In terms of pregnant and nursing employees we believe we should add the following language to section 132. We think it should be more rigid and state, once it is established that there is a risk to the health of the pregnant or nursing mother or to the fetus or child, that division 7 of the Canada Labour Code, part III, the reassignment section, shall apply. For greater and absolute certainty we would like to make reference in part II of the code to the provisions of part III of the code that ensure the safety of the nursing or pregnant mother.
There is another aspect currently in subsection 147.1(1) that will need some attention and of which we are critical. This clause would guard against malicious or vexatious use of the right to refuse unsafe work provisions. We realize that complaints under the right to refuse unsafe work can almost constitute industrial sabotage in a place where the labour relations climate is so hostile that the employees may seek to disadvantage the employer by somehow exercising their right to refuse in a malicious, vexatious or abusive manner.
There was a consensus among the working committee that such a clause could be present because neither party can deny that such a possibility may be raised. It was felt that the language put forward by the government did not accurately reflect the intent of the agreement made. The proposed language we will be putting forward as an amendment will achieve the same objective but in language that we believe will be more balanced. The burden of proof is clearly on the employer to demonstrate malice or mischief, and not on the employee.
The final thing I will talk about is what we see as a huge omission, a huge oversight and a lost opportunity to include what was voted on and ratified in the House of Commons a few days ago, and that is reference to the Westray motion. We passed a motion in the House that the government should amend any pertinent legislation to pay deference to recommendation 73 of the Westray inquiry by Justice Richard. Recommendation 73 states:
The Government of Canada, through the Department of Justice, should introduce in the Parliament of Canada such amendments to legislation as are necessary to ensure that corporate executives and directors are held properly accountable for workplace safety.
We read that to mean to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to contemplate the concept of corporate manslaughter and corporate murder. The Canada Labour Code should point to the directive of Justice Richard and the amended criminal code.
If people are found guilty of gross negligence causing workplace accident or death, they will not only be fined and penalized under the Canada Labour Code workplace safety and health provisions but will also be charged under the Criminal Code of Canada for manslaughter. That is what Justice Richard was talking about. That is essentially what we believe we ratified in the motion the other day. We would like to see some reference to it in the Canada Labour Code.
Other than that, we look forward to dealing with the bill at committee stage. We hope to work with business, labour and government to see it through the House for the betterment of all Canadian workers.