Mr. Speaker, I would like to pursue this further with the hon. member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, who has very accurately put forward the position of the NDP caucus, which is that we absolutely support in principle the bill before us.
But we are very concerned about the possibility, and this has certainly been the assessment of one of the most outstanding lawyers that participated in the Westray inquiry, that in fact were the legislation now before the House, unamended, in place at the time of the Westray disaster, there still would not have been the possibility of holding the correct managers and owners criminally accountable for their completely disgraceful actions.
This, as the hon. member knows, was an inquiry that was correctly entitled, I think, by Justice Peter Richard: “The Westray Story: A Predictable Path to Disaster”. What came out was, and I quote directly from that inquiry, “a story of incompetence, of mismanagement, of bureaucratic bungling, of deceit, of ruthlessness, of cover-up, of apathy, of expediency, and of cynical indifference”.
My question to the hon. member is whether he shares the unease people feel that the government has already let this matter die twice on the Order Paper and that we now have a prime minister in waiting who is a corporate clone if there ever was one. Does he share the concern that Mr. CEO, who may become the new prime minister or very likely will be the new prime minister, in fact is likely to put the corporate interests ahead of the interests of workers?