Mr. Speaker, I rise to talk about this from a different perspective. I want to talk about the back-to-work legislation from the point of view of what I see as abuse of power.
As we sit in this very privileged place, all of us who have pensions, medical and dental benefits and work in a safe environment, it is easy for us to talk in the abstract about the economy and what it needs, forgetting that an economy must be sustained by workers. If workers are not there to make corporations survive and therefore make profits, then they will soon die. It is cyclical. We cannot do one without the other.
That is why negotiations are so important and why a responsible government would not enter into the business of negotiations unless it believed it had come to a point where things had to be handled because they had gone awry. We saw that in 1995, when we had three rail strikes going on at the same time. The whole country was crippled. No one could go anywhere. The government was then forced to step in and the NDP supported us in our back-to-work legislation.
However, one has to allow that to take its time. One has to allow negotiations to occur. Negotiation and the psychology of it builds trust between employers and employees. It creates a sustainable environment in which employees work productively to the benefit of the company. That is psychology 101, not rocket science.
When a government intervenes, it plays a hand that it should not play. As we have heard everyone in the House say before, it is signalling to the employer that it is prepared to step in at any time. The employer then does not negotiate in good faith, the employees become mistrustful, angry and frustrated, tensions occur, we see strikes happen and then the government steps in.
This is a great short-term solution. Sure it gets people back to work. Certainly, it makes everyone think that the economy is doing well. However, in the long term it creates such a toxic labour environment that companies and workers can no longer sustain each other and have to break apart. There will be workers who will no longer want to work in certain sectors even though that is the only skill they have, mainly because they know the minister will intervene in those sectors so they will not have their constitutional right to bargain.
The idea of a constitutional right to bargaining goes back to something else I want to mention, and that being the slow bleeding of democracy in this place. A democracy adheres to the rule of law. The Constitution is the major umbrella law by which any government governs itself and its country. When a government decides that it can turn over and ignore the Constitution any time it wishes to, that again is not only an abuse of power, it is a flouting of the rule of law. The government knows that the rule of law is an important principle to any democratic country. Here we have the government again abusing its power, flouting the rule of law and the constitutional rights of its citizens.
Today we heard about the economy. The point is the economy will not survive unless in the long term there is some kind of trust, peace and a relationship between employers and employees. The government is ensuring that in the long term that will no longer occur and we will have continued decades of labour unrest and businesses not being able to thrive. That is the long-term blow to the economy about which the government talks.
Let us talk about the specifics. My colleague talked about the issue of safety. I am not surprised at all that the issue of safety is ignored by the government. Look at what it has done. It has been cutting back on Coast Guard rescues and food inspections. It seems to think that everything that deals with the safety of Canadians is not worthwhile and disregards it, playing instead into the hands of companies, corporations and businesses and ignoring the safety of the public. Safety is an issue.
Over the last four years, an average of 1,198 accidents have occurred on railroads. That is 1,198 accidents, 61 main-track derailments in a week on an average, 210 at crossings, 160 accidents involving dangerous goods in any one year, 81 fatalities in any one year over the last four years. This is about the safety and security, not of workers but of the communities through which the railroad passes and in which the railroad crossings are located. This is an important issue. Do we think the economy is more important than that? On the issue of fatigue, this is a short-term solution and it actually ignores the safety of Canadians once again.
We sit here very privileged. We have pensions. We have medical and dental benefits. We can sit here on our high perch and talk about what other people need. There is a huge gap in this country between the rich and the poor. The middle class, which is a solid indicator of a good democracy, no longer exists. The way we would go with EI, in which we would force people to take low-wage jobs and the way we would treat workers, in which we would force them to take lower-wage jobs and not negotiate with them appropriately for pensions, means the state would have to take on the burden of caring for every person who is in the low-income bracket, as we would see rising poverty and the rising number of low-income workers.
At the end of the day, the state would have to be responsible for the pensions and the health care and the well-being of our seniors. It is not long-term sense. It does not add up. It is not good math. It does not show the outcomes as very feasible and helping the well-being and benefit of this country on the whole in the long run. Then again, the government does not seem to care about that.
I will talk about the fact that when we look at the responsibility of government it should be not only to take care of this country immediately and in the short term, but to prepare a path in the long term for a strong economy, a strong social system and a strong society in which all people are able to pull their weight and build an economy. When people are in low-paying jobs or do not have jobs and are dependent on the state, who is going to pay the taxes to enable the state to support the people who are dependent on it? If anyone does not see that the government is turning what should be a virtuous cycle into a vicious cycle, this is exactly what the government is doing.
Here we are. If the government thought it won in the five times it intervened in labour negotiations in the last year, we now see it has created chaos that continues. It has created bitterness, long-term anger and unrest. We have two court challenges. The pilots' union is carrying on a court challenge and Canada Post carried on a court challenge.
Finally, I will refer members to what the judge who looked at the court challenges under Canada Post had to say. He said that the minister “would like the exercise of ministerial power...to be unobstructed, unguided or not subject to any criteria of qualification or competence for the arbitrator. In other words, the Minister would merely have to act in good faith and deem the person qualified for it to end the Court's judiciary review exercise.” He also said that “this is not indicated by common sense, case law, the economy of the Act or the specific labour relations context that govern the parties to the collective agreement”. In other words, the minister is interfering and not allowing justice and negotiations and the citizens to have their rights in this instance. This is bad for Canada in the long run.