Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to the debate today and have listened for a few key words. One that I heard from the Bloc Quebecois was about helping workers. I want to take a look at this from the point of view of helping workers but I first want to get some semantics cleared away and clarify a few things.
When we start talking in terms of workers and unions, who and what exactly are we talking about? Is a union solely the collection of the people who are members of that union or does it have an identify of its own? Is that entity separate from those individual members who make it up?
I sometimes get introduced as the member of Parliament for Kootenay--Boundary--Okanagan who belongs to the Canadian Alliance. When that happens I have come up to the podium, thanked the person who introduced me, and said, “I have to make a small correction. I was introduced as belonging to the Canadian Alliance. I do not belong to the Canadian Alliance. I am a member of the Canadian Alliance. The Canadian Alliance is the organization whose policies are most closely aligned with my own. My colleagues in that organization work together with me so I might be far more effective and efficient than I am on my own, so that we may do certain things of commonality for the benefit of all of us”. That is not unlike a union, interestingly enough. However if I belong to anyone I belong to the constituents in my riding, not the party. I do think that is an important difference.
When we start talking in terms of unions we have to remember that a union is an entity that is made up of certain officers and executive, certain ideals and obligations within that executive to the union body itself, and of course its membership.
We spoke to this issue a couple of days ago on a private member's motion, also from the Bloc Quebecois. If we want to talk, in absolute isolation for a moment, to the concept of replacement workers, my response would be that I do not like them. I do not think it is a good system. However it is in isolation. It is such a tiny part of the overall scope of the labour picture that it is almost impossible to put it into context of a piece of legislation or the supply day motion that has been brought forward here in the House.
We have often heard the old adage of reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic . That in essence is what the Bloc is trying to do with the supply day motion it has brought forward. The Bloc members are saying that there are all kinds of problems in labour. They talk about the problems with Miranda. They talk about how long people are out on strike, the suffering of the workers and everything else, and then they come forward with something that touches just a tiny bit of the problem, and I do mean tiny. Taken by itself, they can make a case where in a specific example it has some catastrophic impact, but in the grand scheme of things it is a very tiny portion.
Maybe where to start is with the history of the trade union movement. Back in the 1800s in North America, primarily in the United States, we had things that were scenes right out of Dante's Inferno . We had mill owners who employed people in unbelievable conditions, unsafe and unhealthy, with wages that barely allowed them to buy table scraps and that doomed them to an early death, if indeed an accident in the mill did not do it before. If something happened to them there was nothing for the families. There was back-breaking labour, no time off and no benefits. It was horrible. Those were bad employers. They were oppressive.
Unions started to organize. In those days, union leaders needed incredibly thick skulls, not thick skins as perhaps they would need today. They needed thick skulls because there would be strikebreakers on both sides.
The strikebreakers from the company were hired thugs who would go out with baseball bats, crowbars and everything else to literally beat striking workers into submission. Therefore the person who was the union leader had to be just as tough as those to fight back, to try to deal with it that way. It was a brute force confrontation.
Many people were hurt, maimed, killed or blackballed. It was a horrible time. It was a horrible page in North American history and for history throughout the world where these types of confrontations took place.
Canada certainly was not isolated from this. I am talking about the 1800s. Very early on in the 20th century, right in Atlantic Canada in, I believe, Nova Scotia, there were laws on the books where workers could actually be put in jail just for asking for a raise. As the old cigarette commercial says, we have come a long way but we still do not have a perfect system. One of the reasons we do not have a perfect system is that some parts of the system have evolved and unfortunately some parts of it have not.
Nothing strikes me with more irony than when I hear of a strike taking place, not at Noranda, not at some big company, not at Canada Post or the ports but in fact in a union administrative office where the employer is the union and the workers are on strike because they cannot negotiate with their employer, the union, in a manner in which unions castigate the other employers for not being fair to their workers. It is, one has to admit, very ironic.
There is a growing complexity in terms of the unions themselves and in terms of work issues in this country. One of the things that has changed, part of the evolution of the union movement, is the fact that at one time a long way back the union workers were, by and large, uneducated and unskilled.