Mr. Speaker, I represent Nanaimo—Ladysmith, a region that is served entirely by RCMP members, who are doing fantastic front-line work. I would like to know whether the member agrees with this encapsulation of the problem as identified by one of the members in my region.
This is a letter to me from Clay Wurzinger, who has been a member of the RCMP since 2005. He says:
We as a membership are now approaching 2 years without contract, we have lost all representation within our organization and we are arguably further from a union now than we were 6 months previous.
He goes on to say:
If trends are to continue and members are not provided a comparable payment package to our municipal counterparts you will very likely see manpower issues becoming even more prevalent in your district as recruiting and training will not be able to keep pace with attrition, all the while we will continue to lose our best and brightest and the futures they had to dedicate to tax paying canadian citizens.
Is that a problem the member is seeing echoed in his own region, and does he think this bill, finally allowing RCMP members the right to unionize, will ameliorate those problems?