Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure for me to rise today to speak to the Bloc opposition day motion, the motion which asks this House to “recognize the urgency of amending the Canada Labour Code to ban the use of strikebreakers”.
I have spent 22 years in the labour movement. One of the hardest things when we go on strike is to have strikebreakers. That is an ugly word, but it means having employees replaced by other people to do the jobs employees should be doing. Of course it sets up an unfair balance in the workplace, especially when the time comes to finalize negotiations.
Let me state very clearly from the outset that the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada certainly feels that unions on the whole play a very important role in the country in assuring that the equality of employees is maintained and upheld and as such play an important role in helping to preserve an important part of our country.
However, the PC Party recognizes that the motion attempts to address a very serious matter yet in doing so leaves much open to interpretation and provides little in the area of specifics.
The big thing we have to realize is that we as a body and as government members should never encourage replacement workers, strikebreakers, scabs or whatever we want to call them, to take over from regular employees who are providing serious labour and a serious employer-employee relationship. It has a major impact on the way business is done. If employees and employers are not happy together, production goes down and when production goes down everyone loses. The company will probably lose money and benefits are lost. The company ends up failing, closes up the shop and employees are unemployed as a result. If there were legislation to ensure that there were no strikebreakers allowed, then I firmly believe, from my past experience, that we would see employers having to negotiate fairly. If they do negotiate fairly, they of course I think they will come to a resolution very quickly.
It is very hard sometimes when both parties are apart, but all this does is cause tempers to flare: People get frustrated when replacement workers go in to basically do their jobs. That does not resolve anything. It just causes bad feelings and that is when we get trouble on the picket line. The key is not to cause trouble on the picket line. Picket line trouble comes when other people are in there doing the jobs the employees should be doing. Employers are then of course targeted to make sure that they get the message. We cannot blame the union people and we cannot blame the workers who on strike, because they are fighting for their survival.
In every strike there is an important lesson to be learned on both sides, the employer's and the employees'. In most cases, if not all, solidarity is particularly important in disputes involving workers at the bottom of the jobs and the industries are notoriously difficult to unionized workers. Solidarity within the labour movement when there are strikebreakers involved is stronger than anything we will ever see. People will not tolerate that. People will not tolerate having their livelihood sucked away. When the strikebreakers go in, all of a sudden war breaks out on the picket line. When war takes place on the picket line, someone gets hurt or injured. Tempers flare for one reason or another, and someone could die because we did not do our job to ensure that there is a fair and equitable process to make sure that union and management provide a certain level of negotiations, and that each individual has the right to make sure they get a good agreement.
Of course sometimes it is the same thing when people are not unionized. There are a lot of groups who are not unionized and sometimes they walk out. As a result, people get threatened. They basically are told, “If you threaten to go into the union or if you threaten to leave work or protest like you doing, we are going to replace you. We are going to fire you”. There should be protection for these people, too, but for some reason or another we do not do that, and as a result I think the system fails.
Of course we can all sit down and look at what is being said. I think it is very important that this go to committee. I think it is very important that we not be afraid to discuss this issue. For some reason or another, we at times do not want to talk about situations like those we are hearing about in the House today. There is nothing wrong with sending this to committee so that we can sit down and look at the pros and cons of why and what we are doing. We are supposed to be here to try to make life much easier for people, but if we allow strikebreakers to exist in our society today, then of course we fail the people we are supposed to represent.
It goes without saying that employers, both small and large, but in most cases small, are the lifeblood of the Canadian economy. A good majority of rural employment is due to small businesses that operate in ways that make them the focal points of their communities. The local sports store, the local shoemaker and the local corner store in small communities not only keep the communities going but they also provide a source of employment to the residents, to their families and to the local economy.
That being said, in most cases these unions can have a very damaging effect at times, but at the same time they can have a positive effect because then of course there is unity. People might say that this is no good, but I firmly believe that if people have unionized workplaces, if people have that action to take against an employer, what we see are better relationships and stronger communities. Communities will exist far beyond if people can work in an environment that is satisfactory to everyone.
If areas of the country allow certain things like strikebreakers, all we have is total chaos in the system. Communities lose, employees lose and companies lose, because the key is to make sure there is a good atmosphere so that employers, employees and the community work together to make sure that everyone survives.
It is very important, as I said before, that we not be afraid to move forward. The hardest thing to do is sit back and let certain things happen and say that people deserve this or that. The time has come when we as politicians should stand up and be counted to make sure that we send the correct message, which is that if people are in a unionized field or a non-unionized field, there is a level that should be maintained. People have to live and have respectable wages. People have to make sure that if there is a dispute there is a mechanism put in place to make sure they can have free and open negotiations.
But if all of a sudden the company can bring in strikebreakers, then of course it will do nothing to make sure that the employees are taken care of. It could cause longer strikes as a result, and it does nothing for the economy. It is very important that we move in the direction of going to second reading so that people can have the ability to make sure that their rights are being freely done and freely heard about. It is very important that we as government send a message that we will not tolerate strikebreakers.
I will close by saying that I have never had the opportunity, as a unionist for 22 years, of being faced with strikebreakers, but I will say right now that I was on the picket lines a couple of times in those 22 years. The worst case scenario is to have people going across the picket line to do one's job and just going in there to aggravate. We have been fortunate over the years that we did not experience it, because we had legislation in place that basically gave us the right to negotiate fairly and to have a settlement so that we as a group could feel that we had been heard and our problems had been resolved.
If we ended up having strikebreakers, we, as Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans, would not tolerate it. We are the type of people who stand up for our rights and who fight to our last breath. If it is trouble people want, it is trouble they will get. All that strikebreakers do is bring discontentment to the picket line and discontentment throughout the whole process.