Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to stand on behalf of the New Democratic Party of Canada to speak in favour of Bill C-43, An Act to enact the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Labour Relations Modernization Act and to amend the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.
Our party supports this legislation at second reading, because the bill is generally in line with our party's long-stated support for the right of RCMP officers to engage in collective bargaining, if that is their wish as democratically expressed by the membership.
We, of course, support sending the bill to committee where we look forward to studying it in detail and proposing amendments to deal with a number of specific concerns that we have with the current drafting, to which we have every hope that goodwill on all sides of the House will help us effect positive changes.
The background to the bill is quite straightforward. Bill C-43 was introduced in response to a decision of the Ontario Superior Court, referred to as the MacDonnell decision. Justice MacDonnell ruled in April 2009 that the existing labour relations regime pursuant to the RCMP Act was a violation of the constitutional right of RCMP officers to engage in free collective bargaining, if that is in fact their choice.
Although the government was initially hostile to RCMP unionization and engaged in repeated appeals of judicial findings against the existing system, it appears that the government has come to accept that some form of unionization within the RCMP is not only desirable, but is actually legally required.
Bill C-43 would provide a new labour relations regime for employees of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who are engaged in policing. The proposed legislation is once again the government's response to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice decision I just referred to, and, again, that court held that to deny RCMP police employees the right to engage in collective bargaining, a right that forms part of the right to freedom of association in section 2(d) of the charter, was indeed unconstitutional.
Once that court decision was made in April 2009, there was no longer any mechanism for establishing a collective bargaining framework for RCMP management to police employees. Recognizing that potential vacuum, the court suggested that Parliament consider establishing a legislation framework for collective bargaining. While the court emphasized that a statutory framework was not a precondition to the establishment of an effective process of collective bargaining, such a statutory framework would, in his words, greatly facilitate this outcome.
In light of this recommendation the court suspended the declaration of invalidity of section 96 of the regulations, that is the part of the act that was struck down, for 18 months to allow the government an opportunity to introduce labour relations legislation for RCMP police employees, and I would like to offer my congratulations to the government for complying with that direction of the court.
I want to start back in June 2008, just before the last federal election. At that time the RCMP had been engaged in a long discussion with the government about the long-standing recruitment and retention problems that it had experienced. Also, there are a number, and have been a number, of pressing issues facing the RCMP that I will go over in a few minutes that require not only resolution, but also the important input of the RCMP officers and civilian members to join into the discussion to find a resolution for those issues.
The Conservative government negotiated increases in the summer of 2008 to address those very real recruitment and retention issues identified by the front-line RCMP officers, and in fact RCMP management, and they actually came up with percentage increases that would help to start the process of alleviating those issues.
What happened? The election occurred and intervened in September and October. On October 16, after the election, we found that the Conservative government reneged on its promises. As soon as it was elected in October 2008, the government betrayed its promise on the very percentage increases that it had agreed to for the RCMP just before the election.
I was engaged in collective bargaining for 16 years. One of the cornerstones of labour relations in this country is the concept of good faith. It is the concept that, when parties come to a table and make an agreement, they keep that agreement.
The Conservative government did not do that. It broke its promise. It broke its commitment. It broke its word. The government betrayed the officers who came, in the summer of 2008, and shook hands across the table on a modest percentage increase that the government did not see fit to honour. That is simply unacceptable misconduct, and that is one of the prime reasons why workers consider unionization. When the employer comes to the table and proves itself unworthy of good faith negotiations, the workers then pursue a regime where the other side is compelled to sit down at the table and bargain under a statutory framework because it cannot be trusted.
The Conservative government that broke its promise to RCMP officers are the same people who, in the provincial election of 2009, also told the people of British Columbia that they would not bring in an HST. It is the same politicians. British Columbia Liberals are federal Conservatives. They also misled the voters of that province. They are getting into a habit of breaking their promises and telling voters one thing before an election, when they want their vote, and then acting in a different way after the votes are counted. I come from a riding where democracy is highly prized. The people of Vancouver Kingsway do not tolerate any longer politicians who say one thing before an election and act a different way after an election.
The government fought the simple request by officers of the RCMP to have the right to choose or not to choose to collectively bargain. We must remember that RCMP officers have not chosen to join a union yet, and New Democrats are neutral in this regard. However, we will stand up for all workers in this country to have the right to make that choice for themselves and the right of those workers to make those decisions unmolested, unintimidated and of their own free will and accord, as they measure the pros and cons of collective bargaining. That is a choice purely of the workers. In this case, it is purely the choice of RCMP officers and civilian members across this country to determine if they want to collectively bargain or not.
The Conservative government spent millions of taxpayers' dollars fighting that simple proposal. The courts found that the government's position was unconstitutional, that the longstanding prohibition in law that prohibited RCMP members from collective bargaining in this country was a violation of their charter rights.
The Liberal government that went before the present government also participated in that violation of constitutional rights, so we will hear no great words of wisdom or principle from the Liberal Party about this issue either, since those members did nothing as the constitutional rights of RCMP officers of this country were violated, abrogated and abridged for decades.
I might point out that the RCMP is the only police force in this country that has been prohibited from unionizing. It is high time we corrected this problem. I am proud that New Democrats are the only party that has stood up for the rights of RCMP members to unionize from the get-go.
I also want to talk a bit about RCMP officer input. It has been my experience that successful economies bring to the table the ideas of the management and the entrepreneurs, the ideas and the energy of workers who carry out those directions, and also a government framework that provides a healthy environment for business and labour to flourish at the same time. What is really important about the unionization process in this case is that it can provide a vehicle for RCMP officers to bring to the table their important input into the workplace. That voice has been missing up until now.
I want to congratulate a few people. RCMP officer Patrick Mehain has courageously and with absolute selfless commitment dedicated himself to the fight to allow his brothers and sisters in the RCMP to decide to unionize or not. He has done that at great personal cost to his career. He has demonstrated time and time again the bravery that one would expect from an RCMP officer, but bravery that goes above and beyond the call of duty.
I also want to give great plaudits to the Canadian Police Association and particularly its president, Charles Momy. The Canadian Police Association has been steadfast in lending its support to its sisters and brothers in the RCMP in helping them achieve the very same thing that every other police officer in this country has, which is the right to collectively bargain.
I want to talk a bit about some concerns with this bill, because it is not perfect.
First, it limits the choice of bargaining agent. Right in the bill, it says that the officers can choose any union they want, as long as it is a union that has an established collective bargaining relationship in the policing world. In theory, that is an unacceptable abridgement of a worker's right to choose the collective bargaining agent as they wish. However, I leave it to the RCMP officers to determine if they can find an appropriate bargaining agent. I think that actually they can.
Second, the legislation prohibits certain topics from being discussed at the bargaining table. Once again, that is an unacceptable violation, in theory, of the rights of people to come to the table and to be able to put on the table whatever issues in the workplace they wish. In this case, the legislation prohibits the bargaining agent from talking about these issues: pensions, appointments, promotions, layoffs and classifications.
One can understand pensions, because most public sector employees fall under an already established pension scheme, and I can see that. However, there is no principled reason, in law or in practice, why the bargaining agent or the workers should not be able to come to the table and talk about how their work is classified and give their input and suggestions about how that should work in practice. There is no principled reason to state why those workers should not be able to talk about a layoff process or a fair promotion process.
These are aspects of collective agreements across this country that unions have been dealing with for decades and decades, so we are going to be looking forward to exploring at committee why the government thinks that the bargaining agent should not be allowed to discuss those cases and have input, just input, into how those important aspects of their work relationship operate in practice. We will be working to try to amend the bill in that regard.
I also want to raise a concern of the civilian members of the RCMP who work very closely with the officers. These are people who provide very critical and important support to the RCMP officers in their day-to-day activities. They do scientific and forensic work. They run the full gamut of the policing work and work intimately with the RCMP officers in the field.
This legislation gives the autocratic ability to the minister of the Treasury Board to determine which bargaining unit they may go into, and that as well is an unacceptable infringement of those people's rights to choose who their bargaining agent is and how they choose to bargain.
There are pressing issues that I mentioned that are facing the RCMP, many issues that have challenged the force. I think I speak on behalf of all Canadians when we say that the RCMP has a long and proud tradition in this country. It has been known as one of the pre-eminent police forces in our country for a long time and it has a storied history, one that is full of its triumphs and also, it is fair to say, some of its tragedies. However, the issues that we face today with the RCMP, as parliamentarians, and that the RCMP force itself has to deal with, include the following.
They have to deal with issues of RCMP oversight and developing a structure that can restore the confidence of the public so we know that, when there are complaints against RCMP officers, there is a fair, transparent and accountable process to deal with those complaints.
We have the issue of the government closing single-member detachments all over this country, particularly in rural areas, and that is certainly not the way New Democrats would like to see this force going. We say we should be beefing up those single-member detachments, because the NDP thinks that a having a single member in a small town provides an unsafe, unacceptable working condition for that officer, but the answer is not to close that detachment and leave that community unpoliced.
The New Democrats have heard from rural politicians who tell us that they may be an hour and a half or two hours away from the nearest policing resource. What happens when there is an emergency, when there is a domestic assault case going on or something more serious such as a murder or a sexual assault occurring? The government likes to talk about how tough on crime it is, but really, it is closing single-member detachments, which is going to leave hundreds of thousands of Canadians farther away from a police officer.
We have issues of member burnout, stress and post-traumatic stress disorder, very real issues facing RCMP officers in the line of duty, who are called upon to do a very difficult job on our behalf. They are often the very first person at the scene of an accident, sometimes with fatalities. They have to go to domestic situations where there is spousal assault and children involved. They are the people who have to investigate gruesome crimes of a sexual nature sometimes involving children. They are people who we put into the line of duty every day, into the line of assault and danger to their life and limb. Officers deal with that, and we need to support our officers in that regard.
There are issues of officer morale and at present issues of leadership and management styles in the RCMP. There is the issue of taser use. Just the other day, we found out another person died in this country from the use of a taser, and we need to have a serious look at getting meaningful limitations on the use of that weapon because it clearly is not being used appropriately at the present time. We have issues of RCMP accountability, as I talked about, with civilian oversight.
We also have service delivery issues. I recently met with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, which told me that the federal Conservative government has downloaded $500 million of policing responsibilities on to the municipal and rural areas of this country without a dime of compensation. There is a lack of responsiveness to local policing needs. They told me they cannot get the RCMP to do bylaw enforcement because it does not have the time or resources. Once again, the Conservative government likes to use crime as a political issue and likes to talk and say how tough it is, but it has not put the money behind its word. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities said this to me.
I also want to talk briefly about what unions do and why this is important. Over the last 30 years, the middle and working classes in this country have been hit hard, primarily because of Conservative policies, the policies of the Mulroney government that were carried on by the Liberal Party in the 1990s. The neo-Liberal policies talked about cutting government spending and downloading expenses to the provinces, policies that saw a downloading of costs that resulted in public services being eroded over the last 25 years.
Here are the statistics. Canada's richest 1%, 246,000 Canadians whose average income is $405,000, took almost one-third, 32% of all growth in incomes between 1987 and 2007. That is the period of Liberal and Conservative governments.
Since the 1970s, the richest 1% in this country has seen its share of total income double. The richest 0.1% has seen its share triple. The richest 0.01% has seen its share increase by more than 500%. In 2009, 3.8% of Canadian households controlled $1.78 trillion of financial wealth or 67% of the total wealth in Canada. This is what has happened under Conservative and Liberal rule in this country. The rich have got richer and the middle class and working class have got poorer.
That is why unionization, which has been proved to show that workers will gain more of their fair share of the economic pie in this country, is so important to the RCMP. It is why the New Democrats will continue to stand up for the rights of Canadian workers of all types, including the RCMP, to access collective bargaining if that is their wish, so that they can have a say in their workplace and in bargaining the terms and conditions of their work, including their compensation packages, which will help build better lives for them and their families.