Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Timmins—James Bay for reminding this House and explaining to it some of the history and tradition involved in free collective bargaining and the struggle working people went through to enjoy what we now consider fundamental rights and freedoms, the right to free collective bargaining and, when that bargaining reaches an impasse, the right of working people to withhold their services as a legitimate economic lever to apply pressure to a bargaining relationship that is imbalanced at the outset from the obvious advantage that management has.
I want to begin, though, by clearing up some misinformation that the Minister of Labour has been sharing with this House. She keeps coming back to the point that she believes that what the government has imposed here by its legislation is somehow final offer selection, or FOS. I happen to know something about final offer selection, because it was in fact law in the Province of Manitoba for a period of time, and as a former trade union leader, I have negotiated dozens of collective agreements. In some of those collective agreements, the parties I was representing chose to settle their bargaining negotiations through final offer selection.
This has nothing to do with FOS, which is only effective when both parties voluntarily submit themselves to it as a form of arbitration to settle their differences. The fact of the matter is that both parties present their last best offer and then an arbitrator chooses one or the other. This does not resemble FOS whatsoever, which had its origins in major league baseball to settle wage disputes between teams and players. Once the two parties have stripped away all the other language issues and are down to just money and cannot agree on the money, they put their best offer forward and an arbitrator chooses one or the other, but not a combination of the two.
Therefore, the minister is misleading the House if she is trying to sell this package as a form of final offer selection.
The second thing I would like to raise is that if we scratch the surface of this impasse, its root cause is Canada Post's saying that it is unwilling or unable to maintain fair wages or to meet the wage demands of its employees. However, in actual fact, for the last 10 years or more, Canada Post has been paying a dividend to the Government of Canada to the degree of $200 million to $300 million per year in profits.
If one reads the mandate of Canada Post, and I used to be the critic and know it quite well, nowhere in its mandate is Canada Post supposed to be a cash cow for the government of the day. Its mandate is to provide the best possible mail service to the most people at the lowest possible cost. If there ever is a surplus, it should perhaps go to expanding Canada Post's delivery service to Canadians, or lowering the cost of stamps or buying new vehicles or sorting stations, but not to putting $200 million a year into the general revenues of the federal government.
If we add up the 10, 12 or 15 years that it has been putting $200 million to $280 million a year into general revenue, we would have $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion a year worth of accumulated surplus. With that, Canada Post would have no problem meeting the reasonable wage demands of a reasonable settlement. I am not going to judge what is reasonable or what is not. However, it could not claim poverty or inability to pay, if it were actually following its mandate instead of handing over all this money.
We can scratch the surface of this assault on pensions and get back to its root cause. I think the root cause is the unofficial prime minister of Canada, Thomas d'Aquino, and I do not hesitate saying that, and his new incarnation, John Manley. I say this because 12 years ago, Thomas d'Aquino stood and listed 10 or 15 things that he thought Canada had to do to move forward. What he really meant was what we had to do to re-create our country in the image of the United States, but in his mind it was to move forward. One of those was legacy costs. He flagged those as an unsustainable expectation of Canadian workers for the pensions that had became the norm in the post-war years.
Then the modus operandi kicked in. First, a bunch of right-wing think tanks validated that notion. Then a bunch of lobbyists started chatting up this notion on talk shows and wrote articles in newspapers. Then those lobbyists were dispatched to Parliament Hill and a neo-conservative government dutifully fell into line and did exactly what it had been told to do a decade before by the Business Council on National Issues, or now the CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, John Manley. That is where this comes from. They are hell-bent and determined to re-create Canada in the image of the United States.
Let me point out the folly of that in the context of union rights and fair wages. The greatest strength of the United States and what made it the economic powerhouse that it was until recently was its burgeoning middle class, a middle class that could consume. The United States got that because of free collective bargaining and the rise of the trade union movement from World War I through to the World War II and post-war eras, when unions negotiated fair wages. People want to dump on guys like Jimmy Hoffa, but the one thing that people should remember him for is that he took the lowest-paid occupation in the country and within a decade had turned it into one of the highest-paid blue collar jobs in the country.
Fair wages benefit the whole community. How can people not get that through their heads? When working people have a dollar in their pocket they spend it and they spend it again. In fact, a dollar is usually spent four times before it reaches its natural state of repose in some rich man's pocket. However, in the process on the way to the rich guy's pocket, it benefits a lot of people.
During the Reagan years, they set out to squash the unions in the United States and they succeeded. They went from 35% unionization to 20% to 15% to 12%. The Americans are now down to 9% unionization, and believe me, wages followed, because free collective bargaining had been the only way to elevate the standard of wages and working conditions of the people of the United States. Now they are wondering where all those good union jobs have gone that paid $20 an hour and provided a pension, the jobs that people could raise a family on. Guess what, they do not exist any more. The Americans effectively stamped out the unions because their right wing think tanks told them that it was the way to prosperity.
Our right wing think tanks are telling the government that the road to prosperity means stamping out unions and pushing back and that the notion that people deserve a fair wage and a decent pension is a wild expectation that we can no longer afford. If we buy into that bill of goods, we will be following the Americans right down that same path, because it was middle class consumers who were the United States' greatest strength.
We have not followed the Americans there yet. We are still about 30% or 32% unionized. However, we can see it in the eyes of the guys across the floor that they hate unions. They would love to stamp out unions if they could get away with it. Also in their eyes is the notion of those fat pensions. What is fat about them?
When Marcel Massé stole the $30 billion surplus in the public service pension plan, which I do not hesitate to say he did, we did some research. The average public service pensioner is a woman, aged about 68 to 70, making $9,000 a year from her pension. That $30 billion the Liberal government stole from the public service pension plan and gave in the form of corporate tax cuts to its friends could have doubled the pension of every person collecting a public service pension benefit and we would still have change left over.
There has been a successive assault on fair wages and the notion of pensions, which can be traced right back to Thomas d'Aquino. The unofficial prime minister of Canada dictated that is what they needed to do and a bunch of toady governments, from the Liberal toady government to the Conservative toady government, fell successively into line and implemented and executed just about every single thing on his wish list. They ticked them off one by one, and if we keep following them they will want to re-create Canada in the image of the United States, and it is not a pretty sight south of the border, believe me.