Mr. Speaker, I will start my speech today by saying that employment equity ought to be reviewed and it ought to be scrapped. Basically the Employment Equity Act was passed by the Mulroney government in 1986 and then strengthened by the Liberals in 1995.
It now has a process of its own. It has monetary penalties or taxes for non-compliance. It basically mandates preferential hiring in the federal public service and in federally regulated industries of people from four target groups: women, other aboriginals, visible minorities and the disabled.
For my party this happens to violate something we believe in which is equality of opportunity, not the idea of equality of result. Basically the government should hire on the basis of merit. Anything else actually hurts workplace morale. Making merit a secondary requirement reduces the overall excellence of the public service.
A Canadian Alliance government would repeal the Employment Equity Act, preserve programs ensuring equality of opportunity and competition on a level playing field but not the idea of equality of result.
The Employment Equity Act assumes that Canadians are unfair. It makes that assumption right off the bat. From there it goes on to say that people should discriminate in favour of someone which therefore requires that someone else has to be discriminated against. We cannot have discrimination in favour without also having discrimination against.
It is a travesty that this law was brought into effect in 1986. Then to create enforcement goons to police the law, levy taxes and penalize businesses that are regulated by the federal government because they are not meeting some sort of quota or target is draconian. It is one of the more top down things the government does.
The Public Service Employment Act governs all federal hiring. Section 44 of the act's regulations exempt employment equity programs from the merit requirement. Section 44 is kind of like a Catch-22 except it is twice as bad as it exempts the act from any type of merit requirement.
It would be one thing to say that this law is unfair, does not make much sense, is draconian, top down, bureaucratic and elitist, and I could go on, but it is absolutely unnecessary. According to the government's reports, in 1998 and 1999 both women and aboriginals were actually overrepresented in the public service. I will repeat that again because I want it to resonate for people. The act was implemented in 1986 and 12 years later government reports indicate that its target groups, women and aboriginals, were actually overrepresented in the public service.
The idea that we are to continue with an act, with the enforcement people and with taxing businesses that are regulated by the federal government in this regard is ludicrous. It makes no sense whatsoever. It is creating a government department for the purpose of creating jobs and getting revenue out of private sector regulated businesses. It is ridiculous.
Affirmative action is being challenged in many U.S. states. California abandoned it in 1996. I tip my hat to the Mike Harris government in Ontario which scrapped employment equity in December 1995.
The Liberal government across the way has a large chunk of its seats from Ontario. Yet the people of Ontario in 1995 voted overwhelmingly not for Lyn McLeod and her Liberal Party that supported this provision but for Mike Harris who boldly flew a banner of gold colours and said he would repeal the quota system that was set up by Bob Rae. The people of Ontario rejected the quota system.
The 1995 campaign was a referendum on this very issue. The people of Ontario, whom many of the Liberals across the way claim to represent, turfed this law. They got rid of it at the provincial level. The idea that the government would continue to promote a law that, according to surveys and election results its own electorate does not support when it is raised as a fundamental election issue, demonstrates how out of touch the government is on the whole aspect of employment equity.
I will go into specific examples of why the act is crazy and wrong-headed. I have a friend who wanted to become a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This young fellow approached the RCMP and was told frankly there was no point of even applying because he did not fit the quota. He was not one of the target groups and might as well not even bother filling out the form.
Another example is of someone I knew personally who was determined and persistent. He went ahead, filled out the forms and went through the process. He was told that if he got 120 points or better on the examination he would make it to the next step in the process and would continue on the path toward becoming an RCMP officer.
Lo and behold, he wrote the test and got better than 120. He was told that if he got better than 120 that was good enough and he would move on in the process. Disturbingly he found out that was not the case. He was informed that his score was not high enough. He asked why that was since he was told that if he got more than 120 he would pass with flying colours. It was explained that it was a little more difficult than that. The officials did not want to shoot straight with him because they were embarrassed to admit the failure of their testing system and program.
He was persistent however and he followed up. He talked to four or five different individuals in the RCMP who transferred him back and forth on the phone. Finally he got to someone who was a straight shooter. This person told him that because of his demographics he required more than 130 to move on in the process of becoming an RCMP officer.
My friend asked if he had to get more than 130 to continue on in the process, what would someone else have to get to continue to move on in the process? Some of these target groups I mentioned only had to get 80. They could get less than two-thirds of what he got on the test. They were 65% less qualified than he was according to an objective test and they could continue to move on and be part of the process and eventually become RCMP officers.
However he was told that he had no chance of becoming an RCMP officer because of who he was, the way he looked, where he was born and who his parents were. This gentleman would have made a fine RCMP officer. He had good bearing, good judgment and the ability to go into tough situations and be able to perform the functions of an RCMP officer. I have known people who have served in the police force and I believe he would have been a fine choice.
It does not end with the police. The situation with employment equity, affirmative action or whatever the government chooses to call this form of discrimination goes on.
I happen to be involved with the military through the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs. I expect to see a fighting force when I look at what Canadians want and expect of the military. I expect it to be up to measure and up to snuff. Sometimes I expect it to be an elite fighting force as the airborne used to be before it was disbanded.
The Liberals got rid of the airborne citing politically incorrect reasons. Actually it was a funding issue over some of the things it did to the airborne. There was a health and cost issue in terms of the government paying for some of the things it put these soldiers through. Canadians want our armed forces to be the fittest, the strongest, the best they can be. There is nothing wrong with saying that people want the best, that they want the best person qualified for the job.
If I were wounded and hoping someone would come and take me to a position of safety away from enemy fire, I would want that person to be the fittest, the strongest, the best qualified, and the one who measured up on the merit tests to get to do that job. That is whom I would want saving my life.
Unfortunately that is not what happens with this act. It is all about what is politically expedient and what buys votes for the party in power. It is all about elitist notions of what it thinks is best. It is about a top down view of the world rather than a common sense guy on the front line with a bottom-up approach. Employment equity is about applying a bureaucratic, silly, wrong-headed measuring system to the real world.
I looked into the subject after I was elected in 1997. An enforcer, one of these goons or thugs who enforce the law, came around to my office. My office was known as one of the more politically correct ones in this place. The enforcer came to my office and said that she was on the hunt, that she was looking for more cases. Why is that? I cited how in 1998 and 1999 according to the government's own reports the job was done because it had overrepresentation in the public service of its target groups. These enforcers have not had a lot to do for the last few years.
This enforcer came to my office, sat down with me and my staff and asked whether we had any cases where people might have phoned in over the last little while, told us about anything that might be construed or considered in some way that she could open a case file. Can members believe that? She came to my office because the well was empty and she came up dry. Her to-do jar was done. She came to my office expecting that we would help her in finding either federally regulated industries or public service complaints where employment equity, despite the fact that the government had surpassed its own goals, had not gone far enough.
It was ludicrous that I had this individual, whom we were paying with our tax dollars, come to my office and say that she did not have enough work to do. She asked whether I happened to have referrals that I could give her. She requested to know if there was anybody who seemed to have their nose bent out of joint with regard to an employment equity case that had not gone far enough.
While she was there I thought there was no point in arguing with bureaucrats. They were only enforcing the law that the government passed, however wrong-headed it may have been. Nonetheless these people were only doing their job and I understood that. They were getting a salary and trying to figure out how they were going to make their retirement, pay their bills and put food on the table.
The nasty ones were the government members across the way. These members were the ones who issued these evil orders. They were the ones who sent these people out into workplaces saying that they had to find a monster out there. That was what they were being paid to do. We expect bureaucrats to top-down thumbscrew and implement this law. That is what these people across the way do.
This bureaucrat was in my office and I asked her to pretend I was in a federally regulated industry. I pretended to be in the transportation industry and running a private company that received a complaint from somewhere. The government thought I was not living up to the Employment Equity Act and had a misrepresentation by a few percentage points here or there of what it thought my workforce should look like.
It did not care about the qualifications or the merit based arguments. The bureaucrats looked at my workforce, analyzed it and determined that they did not like its make-up. There was 1% or 2% more here or there than what the government thought there should be.
I understand that government is allowed to mess up government as much as it wants, and that is a shame. Nonetheless I asked her what the government would do to me in that case, if I were that private business person. She flat out told me that it would be demanded. I said that it was my company and that I would not live up to the government's demand. I was the one who cut the cheques and paid the bills. She said that a tribunal would be held. I asked what would happen if I did not attend. She replied that it would be held in any event.
Then I asked what would happen with the tribunal. She said that it would go ahead and assess a fine. I asked what would happen if I did not pay that fine. She said appropriate forces would be used to seize my books and accounts to do what was necessary to extract the government's funds.
There are many other things the government could do. I would love to see the government recruiting more soldiers because we desperately need them, getting more magnetic resonance imagers or CAT scanners in Canadian hospitals because we are so far behind the Americans, and doing all sorts of useful and productive things.
Relatively speaking, all this would make intuitive sense even if the government were to expand our highway system and make sure that the $4 billion to $5 billion it took in per year in fuel taxes was going toward making sure we had good highway infrastructure, wider and safer roads, and a more lit Trans-Canada Highway. That is what I expect of government and is what works. That is what I want the government to deliver. If average Canadians were asked they would say so too.
Instead we have this perverse system that was set up in 1986 because a certain prime minister thought he would inoculate himself from attacks and look more like a caring, sharing, politically correct and sensitive kind of guy. Then the Liberals got in and made it even worse. They took it from the absurd to the truly absurd and far out ridiculous. There are bureaucrats marching around with orders to tamper with federally regulated businesses, the military or the RCMP. Their job is done. They have achieved and surpassed their targets.
For the last three years I have had bureaucrats come into my office asking if I could give them referrals for work out there. It is absolutely ridiculous that it has gone to this. The civil service hiring policy, whether it be for the RCMP, the military, Industry Canada or any number of the bureaucracies represented by too many ministers across the way, should be based on some common sense principles, on fiscal responsibility, on merit and on who is best qualified for the job. That is what we stand for.
The Liberals across the way love to come up with and push elitist notions. They hire bureaucrats who go into private sector businesses with their top down solutions. We are not just talking about the civil service. We are also talking about federally regulated businesses. These bureaucrats sit down with someone in a company, probably the human resources person, and they come up with some silly, absolutely whacked out federal government formula of an idea where they may tell the company that it has too many females as secretaries or that it has too many males as window washers. This is an example off the top of my head because I talked about it with the bureaucrat who came to my office.
They then go ahead with their political interference and meddle around in a private corporation, or even in the effectiveness of the bureaucracy of a given crown corporation or some other civil service job, and implement totally undemocratic ideas that the public itself would not support nor vote for in a referendum. It goes to show how out of touch the Liberals actually are. It makes no sense.
I will cap off my debate by reiterating some things for perhaps the people in the gallery or the people listening at home. The Employment Equity Act should be reviewed and, for my Liberal friend across the way, employment equity should be scrapped. In his own riding, I am sure a Tory was elected who thought that was a good idea.
It does not make any sense to ruin workplace morale by hiring people under these types of formulas when, according to the government's own figures, they were overrepresented according to the quotas and targets in the workplace. Why would the government persist with something that pits one person against another in earning a living and putting bread on the table? It does not make any sense whatsoever.
I would ask the Liberal heckler across the way to please review employment equity and see fit to scrap it. I am sure many people in his own riding may at some time like a job or at least the opportunity to apply for a job with the RCMP, the civil service or a federally regulated industry. I do not think they would want to be told that because of who their parents are they cannot have the job. It is not right and deep down the member knows that. I served with him on the citizenship and immigration committee and I think he knows this issue all too well.
I hope the Liberals will review employment equity and scrap it.