Mr. Speaker, I was in my office watching these exciting debates on my television while I was working on things when somebody said they did not know whether anybody from the Alliance would be talking to this. I thought l had better get in here and express our opinion.
I have some pretty good ideas and I have quite a bit of experience in the area of staff, hiring staff, relationships, collective agreements, all those things. I have some pretty strong ideas about the bill and I am very honoured to say a few things about it.
I believe that where there is a lot of staff, the only practical way of hiring that staff is with a collective agreement.
When I worked at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, we had 750 instructors. It was quite impractical to hire each one on an individual contract because of the diversity that was required in the different areas, the obvious problems of favouritism and that type of thing. A collective agreement was very much in order.
I was the union steward for a while, and the president of the staff association, and the president of the local of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees. There were many times when I looked at the collective agreement and said that in a way one size does not fit all. Just as any woman would say when it comes to buying pantyhose that one size does not fit all, this is true in collective agreements as well.
We can have an agreement that says someone who has a certain amount of education and experience gets a certain salary and someone who is required to work from 8 in the morning until 4:30 every day gets one hour for lunch.
At the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology we taught classes. Our collective agreement said that we should all have one hour for lunch starting between 11:45 and 12 and ending one and one-quarter hours later. A person who started lunch at 11:45 would be back on the job at one and a person who started at 12 would be back by 1:15. It did not fit because a lot of us had classes starting at 12:15. When I was there all the classes started at 15 minutes after the hour and went for 55 minutes. Sometimes there were double classes which were basically two 55-minute periods.
We had some problems trying to get that through the collective agreement process. Some individuals said it was not a problem, that they would take their lunch hour from 11 to 12. I was one of those guys who was compliant. I remember one time in my schedule my lunch hour was from 8 to 9:15 in the morning. That is how I got the shape I have now; it started then, from eating at irregular hours. Others said that no, they would only take their lunch hour at the time the collective agreement stated.
What happened was that those of us who were compliant ended up teaching during the noon hour. Those who said that they were standing by the agreement got their lunch hour during the prescribed hours.
It worked out anyway because people were able to work around the system. But it was very difficult because of the variations in individual cases.
Then we had instructors who taught in other areas. I was in the academic department, but others taught in other areas. It was very difficult to come up with one collective agreement that fit the needs of a mathematics or physics instructor as opposed to someone who was teaching medical lab technology, as opposed to someone else who was teaching the paramedics, as opposed to someone else who was teaching heavy duty diesel mechanics. There were many variations.
Somehow the big union was not able to get its head around our particular needs there. We landed up spending almost as much time fighting with our union as we did with our employer, with the result that things really deteriorated.
The reason I am saying this is because in this particular environment we all have some very special needs. I strongly believe that it is absolutely important for us to be able to hire people to work strange hours if that is required. If we have people who work extraordinarily long hours, it would be fair for us to have the flexibility to pay them a little more, and perhaps others who work the more stringent hours, for whatever reasons, to get paid a little less. However, each one of us must be able to do that. It is important to provide a specific work plan for each individual in this environment because we have a relatively small number of employees.
I want to reiterate that when there are a large number of employees, even when I think back to NAIT, I really do not know how else we could have done it. It would have been difficult to start saying that we would have 750 individual contracts. It would have been an administrative nightmare. But here we have a leader of the party who, with his or her chief of staff, has made an arrangement for a staff of between about 50 and 150 people. I think the government probably has quite a few more than that. That is a manageable size. That is not out of capacity at all for individual contracts.
I reject the hypothesis that unless it is done by collective agreement that it will not be fair. The onus is on all of us, as individual members of Parliament and as directors in our respective parties, to ensure that the working conditions, the employment package, and everything there is fair.
When I was first elected way back in 1993, almost 10 years ago, I would have liked a few more statistics. We received this little sheet that said we could hire our staff and we could not pay them more than a certain amount. I had no idea as a neophyte what I should pay my staff. What were the standards and norms? I would have liked a little more actual help in that regard to say what the norm was and what members of Parliament were generally paying. I would have liked means and standard deviations. That may have been as useful as ranges of salaries based on experience and so on. That statistic should be available without divulging individual information.
That would have been helpful, but going to a collective agreement in this particular environment is not a good fit at all. The concept is good. We must ensure that we are fair. However, I reject the idea that unless there is a collective agreement guaranteeing the rights of the employees that they are not going to get them.
We all know the horror stories. I was involved in our staff association. I was the president and the chief guy that dealt with problems, and I dealt with problems continuously. That was in an environment where there was a collective agreement. We are going to have problems either way.
Perhaps what we ought to do is have a better liaison system where staff can go to their party bosses and say that one of our MPs is doing this and could we look at that. There might be a system there, but I would not support this particular initiative even though I do strongly believe in fairness to staff.
As an employer in charge of only three staffers right now, I have an obligation. If I expect loyalty from my staff, I must show them loyalty as well and ensure that they get paid adequately, that their working conditions are fair, and that they can look after their families if that is their need. I insist that we keep that flexibility and so with regret I will not support this particular bill.