The civil service is justifiably demoralized after years of the madness of program review. Thirty thousand jobs were slashed. There were seven years of wage freezes. The previous president of the Treasury Board took $30 billion out of the public service pension plan surplus without any consultation with employees who owned that money. Confidence is at a new all time low. Productivity is down and so is morale. All these issues need to be addressed.
I am relieved and pleased to hear that a new Public Service Labour Relations Act will be imposed. When public employees won the right to free collective bargaining in 1967, there was never a proper labour relations regime imposed at that time. Therefore the massive public service has been floundering in a grey zone with no clear definition of how the collective bargaining regime should be operated, short of putting it under the Canada Labour Code. We are optimistic that a new labour relations act will finally give satisfaction to many of these long outstanding issues.
We in the NDP will be paying close attention to the bill as it moves forward. We hope that the recommendations of the Fryer commission, a long comprehensive study that took place leading up to the introduction of the bill, will be included in the bill. We will look for these changes. We do not want to just tinker with the act. We want to make substantive changes that will change the lives, the quality of work life and job satisfaction, which is so important if we are to expect productivity in the public sector.