Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague has of course has been a champion of workplace health and safety protections in his role as labour critic of the NDP and previously as a labour leader in the field. Therefore, what he very much recognizes is the inadequacy of our current laws to hold corporations accountable for what essentially is corporate greed very often in not ensuring that the kind of workplace health and safety conditions are created, that the workplace health and safety training is there and that investment in the job and working conditions is absolutely essential to provide the safest possible working conditions.
Sometimes I think people will say that we cannot prevent workplace accidents from happening. It is an absolute cop out to take that view. Of course we cannot prevent all accidents but most accidents can be prevented. The question is whether a company takes all the precautions that can be taken and can be reasonably expected to prevent the preventable accidents from ever occurring.
Many people watched in horror the account of the Westray disaster. What became absolutely clear was a convergence of political optimism by the respective governments of the day, and this is well documented, the Conservative government in Ottawa and the Conservative government in Nova Scotia, together with a corporation that engaged consistently in criminally irresponsible behaviour. When it came to trying to obtain convictions, it was not even possible for the law to get to first base with respect to that company. It was not possible to enforce subpoenas to bring the two most responsible persons in that company before the Westray inquiry let alone before the courts.
Therefore, what we are talking about here is changes to the Criminal Code that would make it possible to see through the kinds of convictions that would be appropriate to hold the corporate directors and the senior decision makers in a company also responsible for their actions, as all workers are now held responsible for their actions.
Why we need to see amendments to this bill when it gets to committee and before it comes back to the House for final consideration is because in the most ironic and perverse way there is a stiffening of the penalties that would apply to lead hands, to workers directly, but there is a very big escape for the most senior officers. Yet the recommendation of the Westray inquiry, the judge who presided over it, Peter Richard, was that we needed changes to the Criminal Code that would specifically make it possible to hold the senior directors and officers of a company criminally liable.
Those are the kinds of changes we need to get the job done correctly.