Madam Speaker, I have a letter from the president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour, Lana Payne, addressed to me. I assume the six Liberal MPs from Newfoundland and Labrador have also received a copy of the letter, because she is asking all opposition members to take whatever steps are necessary to remove the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act from the budget implementation bill. We will have a chance to do that later today, so I hope the Liberals from Newfoundland will help to try to defeat this.
I do not know if there has been enough attention given to one of the things she complains about in the letter, that in the budget implementation legislation there is a provision that says that if an individual woman in the public sector files her own complaint through the Human Rights Commission, if a union supports and helps in that effort, the union will be fined $50,000 for helping one of its members apply to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
I wonder if the member for Winnipeg North would care to comment on the fact that a government would impose a fine on a union for helping a member file a human rights complaint. Is that something she has ever heard of before? I know I have not. I do not know everything that has happened in this country in the last 50 years, but this is a real shock to me.