Mr. Speaker, I really am undergoing a transition in my life right now because my new duties have me away from the House so much. I have duties of organization in our party and I do not get to participate as much as I would like to in committees and in the House. It is a pleasure to be here at 7.15 in the evening participating in and listening to the debate.
Again when I saw the private member's motion I noted that it is one of my interests so I thought I would listen to the debate and see what it was all about. At the end of the debate, lo and behold I have some ideas I want to share.
This motion is quite specific. I will not read all of it because it has been read into the record. It states that:
...the federal government should take all the public policy and legislative steps necessary to encourage the adoption of a shorter work week--
That sounds wonderful, especially, I think, for a member of parliament.
I had a habit of keeping track of my hours of work for a number of years even though I have not been paid by the hour for many years. I used to work in a job that was a union job. We were required to be there 36 and a quarter hours a week. One day when I got a nasty and unwarranted reprimand from my boss for leaving 10 minutes early, because he did not know I had been there since 6 o'clock in the morning, I decided to keep track of my time
I discovered that my average time on that job as an instructor at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology was 55 hours per week. That is what it took in order for me to do a good, professional job for my students. There were many days when after I did some voluntary work in the evening I did not get to see my family at all.
I think the intent of the bill is a good one. In our society we should be able to work fewer hours. However, I think we need to look at a very fundamental economic fact here, that is, it is not sufficient to simply pass a law that states we will all work fewer hours. That is not sufficient because of the fact that none of us are willing to give up more of our standard of living.
I will give members an example. When I was a youngster, which was many years ago, I remember my father building a house. We could not afford to hire people to build the house, so my father did most of the work. He started by digging the basement. Nowadays in order to dig a basement, a person picks up the phone and tells the guy with the backhoe to come over and dig the hole that will be the basement of the house, that the specifications will be there. When my father built this house he hooked a device called a beegee behind a horse, and by hand, with the help of the horse, he dug the basement. It took an awful lot of work. I do not remember how long it took him, but I would think that he probably worked a week on digging a basement that now could probably be done in an hour.
We could pass a law that says my dad should work fewer hours, but the fact of the matter is that economically it takes either a lot of labour or the inclusion of machinery and equipment to make the work more efficient. That is what has happened. It is the induction of capital and capital equipment that have provided us with the ability to still have the same and even a higher standard of living with fewer hours of work.
Therefore it is an economic thing that we need to take into account, much more than it is the simple passing of a law that states we will work fewer hours, as desirable as that may seem.
I believe the member's motion is well intended. I would certainly support it. I see many families, including the families of my own children, where one or both of the parents are working long hours and it would be very healthy if they could spend more time with their own children and with the rest of us as a family. There would be more time for leisure activities. That is all very desirable, but I think we cannot lose sight of the fact that unless we balance this with the kind of productivity that we should be encouraging in this country, our standard of living is going to drop. I do not think anybody is prepared to pay that price.
I would also like to say that in terms of actually producing income this is another factor which is very important. The labour unions are mostly working on converting labour into cash which then can be used to buy the necessities and the luxuries of life, depending upon how much one earns.
I would like to see the labour unions, the NDP and the socialist philosophy get real. What we must do is start encouraging people to participate not only in the labour market but also in the capital market. Let us get involved. When one buys a share in a piece of equipment, the work that equipment does is also a revenue generator. One can get revenue from the tractor just like one can get revenue from labour. That enhances the value and the standard of living. When we do that individual families can obviously afford to work less if they have income from other sources.
It is a combination, it is not one or the other. I would like to see labour unions in particular help to educate their members on investments so that part of their income, not a large part, can be enhanced so that they could thereby afford to work less and we would move in that direction. We must do this by a process of replacing the necessity of the long hours rather than by passing a law to reduce the long hours of work.