Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Beloeil—Chambly for his remarks. I am in perfect agreement with his point.
Today, it is not only workers at Canada Post who will see their working conditions set back. The entire labour movement will be affected. They have just been deprived of the right to freely negotiate their working conditions. This will affect the entire labour force. We are entirely opposed to this situation.
As legal experts Drouin and Trudeau point out, what happens is that, when you enact this many pieces of special legislation, for example against the right to strike and against workers’ right to freely negotiate their working conditions, special legislation ends up being trivialized.
As we can see, the two parties who have historically held power in the House are making this kind of thing commonplace.
They are eliminating rights and they do not care because buying things is more important, and they would not want to get them in the mail late. That is what we are talking about here.
They are eliminating basic rights and trivializing the situation because that is what enacting 14 pieces of special legislation in 28 years does. Trivializing the act of eliminating workers’ right to freely negotiate their working conditions is a dangerous precedent. It will affect not only postal workers but every worker in Canada.
Do we want to guarantee social and economic peace? That is what a legal framework for negotiating working conditions and collective agreements is all about. Do we want to maintain social peace? We have adopted rules and we need to follow them. If we eliminate the rules during Canada Post’s most profitable quarter and say that we are doing it in the interest of the economy, that is short-term vision that jeopardizes social stability over the long term.
That is what we are talking about today. That is why we stand firmly on the side of workers and condemn this situation and this special legislation. It is pretty devious of the government and the Liberal Party to claim to be progressive and on the side of workers and then not hesitate to deprive them of their rights.
They say they are progressive.