Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Kildonan—St. Paul.
Whenever a government intervenes, it must prove that such intervention is both necessary and just. The labour minister's bill today proposes an intervention that must pass these same tests. Is it necessary? Is it just?
To consider the necessity test, let us consult history, geography and economics.
History tells us that British Columbia would not have joined Canada without the promise of a railway, and John A. Macdonald confirmed that the nation would not have survived its embryonic state without the tracks. Rail, he said, would “give us a great, an united, a rich, an improving, a developing Canada, instead of making us tributary to American laws, to American railways, to American bondage, to American tolls, to American freights...”. In 1885, Donald A. Smith pounded the last spike into a rail line that would climb over the Rocky Mountains, cut through the Prairies, link communities and unite Canada from sea to sea. We would not exist, quite simply, without the railway, and its necessity lives on to this day.
In the 127 years since the completion of that project, geography has made rail essential to our well-being. Some 5,500 kilometres separate Cape Spear, Newfoundland, from the Yukon-Alaska border, giving us the second largest country in the world and the eighth least-dense population on the planet. In such a country, freight moves roughly 70% of surface goods every single year, which brings us to economics.
If Canadian Pacific were one of many rail lines, we would not be having this conversation. Shippers would simply hire another rail line and continue about their business until the strike was done, but it is not just another rail line. It is one of only two class 1 railways. It has 24,000 kilometres of rail that link six provinces, all the way from Port Metro Vancouver in the west to the Montreal port in the east. It handles 74% of potash, 57% of wheat, 53% of coal and 39% of container traffic. What would happen to all the workers who depend on potash, wheat, coal and container shipping if it were to sit idly during a strike? Factories, farms, mills and mines cannot reach their markets, grains pile up, workers down their tools, consumers pay more and wait longer, all at a cost of $540 million per week to the Canadian economy.
Does this back-to-work bill pass the necessity test? Economics make Canadian Pacific necessary to rail service, geography makes rail service necessary to our well-being and history makes it necessary to our nation's very existence. Yes, it is necessary for the strike to end and for us to end it.
The second test for government intervention is whether it is just. I detest, with every fibre of my being, unnecessary and unjust state intervention. It is good, therefore, that back-to-work legislation is rare. Last year, there were 407 collective bargaining agreements reached across Canada in federal jurisdiction.
We legislated back-to-work laws twice. That is less than one-half of 1% of the cases, yet opponents of this bill will argue that a free enterprise government like ours should never intervene in a private sector bargaining dispute.
The government is already involved. Section 70.(1) of the Canadian Labour Code forces workers to pay union dues, even if they do not wish to be members of a union. The law forces money out of workers' pockets into union coffers. The union has the power to shut down a workplace, even for those workers who do not support the strike.
These legal powers give the union a state-enforced monopoly on labour in the rail sector. Unions want the law to grant them monopolistic powers without any laws to limit the damage that these powers can do to unwilling bystanders. The bystanders in this dispute are the workers who do not want to be on strike, the farmers trying to ship their goods, the consumers trying to buy them and every Canadian who must bear a part of the $540 million a week cost of this strike.
Given these facts, it is necessary for Parliament to act, it is just for Parliament to act and act we will.