Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to make a brief comment and ask a couple of questions of my colleague from Vancouver Island North. She should be commended for having shared with the House her perspective as a proud trade unionist, as someone whose family for generations has been affected by the existence of the railways and the importance of the railways to logging communities, and as someone who has a considerable amount of expertise and experience in relation to health and safety issues.
Let us make no mistake about it. The implications of the health and safety issues at stake here are enormous, and not just to the railway workers themselves, but they are enormous because health and safety issues in the context of rail travel translate into very considerable threats, potentially, to the travelling public. Even more broadly, they pose very serious threats with dire consequences in the event that failed health and safety practices result in train derailments and in spills of toxic chemicals and so on. They literally can affect not just families who are living immediately adjacent to rail lines, but actually whole communities that have railways passing through them or even running nearby.
I know that the member for Vancouver Island North shares a very deep concern for those families, as we all do, families whose immediate livelihoods and immediate jobs can indeed be adversely impacted by an impasse and a prolonged strike. In relation to the jobs they perform, they may depend upon supplies coming in or products going out. One should be very clear about this. This is every bit as much of a concern to the workers who find themselves in this untenable situation in this dispute as it is a concern to each and every New Democrat member of Parliament.
It is precisely because these concerns are widely felt that we are adamant that taking this wrong-headed approach of back to work legislation, instead of respecting and supporting a proper collective bargaining process, can unnecessarily cause very long-lasting negative impacts on the workforce.
I have a couple of very brief questions. The member has a great deal of experience with collective bargaining and with the trade union movement. I wonder if she could comment on what it says about the existing nature of the relationship between CN and its workers that 79% of the members of that union actually felt it necessary to vote against ratification of the tentative agreement. In other words, this obviously is not a frivolous decision on their part.
I wonder if she could comment on what the long term damage can be to the morale and the working relationship between a corporation and the workers, especially one headed by a CEO who is collecting $56 million. That is so obscene it is impossible to get my head around it. In regard to a corporation like that and the workers, what are the implications over the medium term and long term for both the morale and the quality of the work that one can expect to emerge from that situation? What are the implications when the collective bargaining rights of workers are simply quashed, which is what the government is trying to do with the support of both the Bloc and the Liberal Party?