Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie for his bill.
I also thank my colleagues for so brilliantly expressing their opinions about this bill to allow pregnant or nursing women who are subject to the Canada Labour Code to avail themselves of provincial preventive withdrawal provisions when they are more beneficial.
The Quebec program known as “Pour une maternité sans danger” allows a pregnant or nursing worker who believes that her job poses a risk to her pregnancy or the health of her child to ask her employer for another assignment. She must obtain a doctor's note, which is submitted to her employer. If it is impossible for the employer to eliminate the risk or to assign the worker to other duties, she can use preventive withdrawal and receive compensation.
Quite by accident, I recently came across an article indicating that all pregnant American women have many chemicals, including some that have been banned in Canada since 1970, such as DDT, in their system. I am talking about the United States, which is not very far from us. We know that pollution has an impact on the environment and that it crosses borders.
Chemicals are used to manufacture non-stick cooking utensils, in industrial foods and in beauty products. Think of all the women who work in hair salons, spas and nail salons. They are constantly in conditions where they are breathing in chemicals. We know that these women who work for minimum wage cannot afford to leave their jobs.
This was the first time anyone had counted the number of different chemicals that can be present in the body of a young woman, one who is pregnant to boot.
The purpose of the study was not to link chemicals and their effects on health, but a number of chemicals were measured in concentrations that have been proven to be harmful to children, causing reproductive problems in boys, delayed neurological development from mercury poisoning, altered neurological development and thyroid problems.
These chemicals are able to pass across the placenta and reach the fetus. They can be found in the amniotic fluid, the umbilical cord blood and the meconium. Exposing a child to chemicals during pregnancy increases the risk of miscarriage and premature birth and also has an impact on the child after birth, not to mention the mother.
The point here is to protect pregnant and nursing women. People are perhaps not aware, but I live in a province, the only one in the country, where women have access to this kind of program. I can give many examples where this program has been extremely useful and has protected a pregnant woman and her baby. I am thinking of a particular woman who was expecting not just one, but two babies. For a first pregnancy, twins are already quite difficult, but in addition, this young woman worked in a rehabilitation centre for violent adolescents. So there was an additional potential danger that she might be hurt when one of the adolescents was aggressive. I can tell you that this was a familiar scenario.
In this kind of situation, there are two options: either the person withdraws from her employment because of the danger that it represents, or she is reassigned to other duties, for instance, administrative duties where she is not in danger.
There was another woman who had to spend the last four months of her pregnancy on bed rest. I am giving examples that I have come across in the various jobs that I have held. That decision was not particularly exciting, but it was necessary in order to prevent the woman from giving birth at a stage when the fetus’s vital organs, such as the lungs, are not fully developed.
I could also talk about all the women who work standing up in banks or other businesses, and God knows there are a lot of them. They have to stand up all the time. Their legs are tired. Being pregnant is tiring.
For these women and hundreds of others in Quebec, the special provisions on preventive withdrawal have enabled them to carry their pregnancy to term in a safe environment. This is a provincial program, administered by Quebec's occupational health and safety commission, the CSST.
The Canada Labour Code stipulates that an employee who is pregnant or nursing may cease to perform her job if she believes that, by reason of the pregnancy or nursing, continuing any of her current job functions may pose a risk to her health or to that of the fetus or child. The employee can request reassignment, if the medical practitioner determines that a risk exists. While waiting for the medical report, the employee continues to receive the wages and benefits that are attached to that job. If reassignment is not possible, the employee can take an unpaid leave of absence. I took these notes from a speech that was given previously by a member of the Bloc Québécois.
This bill is fair for all pregnant and nursing women in Canada whose workplace could be hazardous to the proper development of their fetus. For now, only Quebec has a preventive withdrawal program to protect pregnant and nursing women. This program allows women to receive up to 90% of their salary if their working conditions are deemed hazardous for them or their babies. Other Canadian women are only entitled to unpaid leave. We believe that this situation is unfair to women who do not live in Quebec.
This is a good example of a two-tiered system. It is completely unfair to nursing and pregnant women in Canada who live outside Quebec. The NDP is of the opinion that the federal government must meet its responsibility toward these pregnant and nursing women by offering them the same conditions as women in Quebec.