I hear the hon. member for Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam making his usual incoherent noises, Madam Speaker.
The point is that it is the people of Cape Breton and the miners who have worked all these years for Devco who have been put aside.
I might say that we stand here very much in the tradition of former members of parliament from Cape Breton, New Democrat and CCF members. There were members such as Clarence Gillis and Andy Hogan, with whom I had the opportunity to serve in this place for a brief period of time. This same great tradition has been served ably and well by the hon. member for Bras d'Or—Cape Breton and the hon. member for Sydney—Victoria.
All through the years we have been arguing for the welfare of the miners, and even when it came to this bill we realized that the government had the ability to get its way. It has the numbers. It used them tonight, in co-operation with other parties I might add, to impose a form of closure on this debate.
What is really galling is that it has not been willing to accept even the slightest amendment to its bill. We have seen this before. It is an unfortunate trend. There was a time in the House of Commons when members of the opposition knew they could not get amendments accepted which changed the basic intent of the bill or which significantly altered the consequences of the bill, but they could impose upon the conscience of government members to accept amendments which would make the transition a little easier, which would provide for a context after the implementation of the legislation, or which would ameliorate some of the possible consequences of the bill.
That is what our members from Cape Breton have been trying to do and in every way they have been met by a kind of intransigence, which I know has frustrated them in their efforts and has frustrated us. Let us look at some of the amendments they wanted to move.
They wanted to provide for at least one employee representative to sit on the Devco board of directors. That is radical. One employee representative to sit on the Devco board of directors. I am sure the Prime Minister, when he was over giving his third way speech, which really should have been called the zero way speech, was probably talking about involving workers and all kinds of flowery stuff. Here the Liberal government had an opportunity to include one employee representative on the Devco board of directors, and what do we get? Zilch. Nothing. Diddly-squat. Intransigence. Resistance.
This is not just an insult to the members who move these amendments; it is an insult to the people of Cape Breton. They must be asking themselves what kind of attitude the Liberal government has toward them that it would not trust them to have one employee representative sit on the Devco board, or a residency requirement ensuring that a majority of the directors of Devco live on Cape Breton Island in the communities affected by the corporation's decisions. If the government were really concerned about the consequences of this privatization for the community, would it not want to see members of the community on the successor board to make sure the new corporation had some sensitivity? If the government thought that a majority of the directors is too much for it to live with, it could have reduced it and provided some other number.
The list goes on: ensure that one-third of the directors of Devco are representatives of the employees' pension association. There are a lot of pensioners after a lot of privatization who have been absolutely beat up and mugged by the consequences of privatization.
I can think of two in particular. When a previous government privatized CN Express is a good example. The people who took it over had no regard for the well-being of workers or pensioners and a long struggle ensued. There are all kinds of reasons to be concerned about privatization.
Some privatizations have gone reasonably well and there has not been anything to worry about. One of the ways to make sure we do not have anything to worry about is to have people on the board whose first loyalty is to pensioners and to the workers. Is there any progress on that? Not at all.
The list goes on and it is why we have chosen this evening to raise this matter and to speak, one New Democrat after the other, in order to make the point one final time that what the government is doing is wrong. This debate over the Devco legislation has been going on for some time now, not just in the House but in committee. It is wrong for the people of Cape Breton. It is wrong for the miners. It is wrong for the communities. It is a violation of everything that a number of former Liberal members of parliament and Liberal cabinet ministers used to stand up for. It is a sign of just how depraved and deprived the Liberal Party has become that it would even consider doing what it is doing here tonight.