Madam Speaker, I rise to indicate the opposition of the New Democratic Party to this back to work legislation. I suppose it will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with the stance that the NDP has taken in the past on back to work legislation.
I was in the House on a number of occasions when we dealt with some of the back to work legislation members referred to earlier tonight. Unfortunately, I say to the member for Wild Rose, I have heard other ministers of labour say that they had to do something about bringing forward a system to ensure that they would not have to do this as often as they do.
I have two things to say in that regard. I hope this time the government will try to bring in such a system. However we ought not to assume the system it brings forward is one we will automatically agree with. We may have problems with it but certainly the government ought to make an effort in that regard.
It was interesting to listen to some of the remarks members of the Bloc Quebecois, the official opposition, made on this matter. Earlier they had an opportunity in the House to delay the legislation and they did not use it. When the government invoked the standing order that permitted it to proceed without unanimous consent, if 10 Bloc Quebecois members had risen at the appropriate time to object we would not be dealing with the legislation tonight. There seems to be a bit of a gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to the attitude of the official opposition in this regard.
With respect to the government and its sense of urgency which it did not display yesterday but which it has in abundance today, its sense of urgency is related to the movement of grain and the importance of agriculture. We all know how the argument goes.
I wonder why the government always refuses to take seriously and hold up to public attention that in many of these cases, as was the case yesterday and today before the lockout, the workers were willing to continue moving grain. I know this does not help other shippers but grain is often held up as the reason for the urgency.
In these situations I have seen workers and unions repeatedly offer to keep moving grain. It is the companies, the employers, that will not tolerate the situation because they want the government to step in. They rely on it. They know if grain were to keep moving the political pressure for government intervention would disappear. Therefore they lock out the employees to make sure the grain cannot keep moving to create the appropriate political scenario so the government then has in some sense a false sense of urgency. If the government really had a sense of urgency about moving grain, it would respond to the offer of the employees in the situation and make sure it was accepted by the company. But the government never does that. It never ever does that. That is something I wanted to put on record.
When I last checked about an hour ago bargaining was continuing between the union and management. It would certainly be ironic if by the time we finished tonight they had an agreement. Let us hope so. It is always better if something can be negotiated rather than brought to a conclusion by legislation.
Again going back to the extent to which the government often bases its arguments about its concern about moving grain-and I know my Reform colleagues will not agree with me-this is the same government that announced in the budget the end of the Crow benefit. In the judgment of many, and not just the New Democratic Party, that had an extremely deleterious effect on western Canadian farmers.
We are supposed to believe the crocodile tears that are being offered on the other side for western Canadian farmers when only a couple of weeks ago, in the their budget of February 27, the Liberals completed the job that they started in 1983 in the House when they were in government. It was the Liberal government of that day, I would remind western Canadian farmers who might be listening, that began the demise of the Crow rate.
I was here then and part of that great parliamentary battle. That was before the Tory government changed all the rules so that opposition could not have great parliamentary battles any more. We cannot delay things. We cannot allow time for public opinion to develop. We cannot do all the things opposition parties used to be able to do to give public opinion time to mobilize on an issue. It does take time.
It was the Liberals who started doing the job on the Crow rate then and they are finishing it now by getting rid of the Crow benefit. I do not swallow it when I hear Liberal cabinet ministers or Liberal members or anybody else getting up and giving me the old sob story about western Canadian grain farmers. From our point of view we believe the Liberals are doing far more harm to the agricultural community in western Canada by virtue of the policies announced in their budget than a strike on the west coast could ever do.
I would like to pick up on something the Bloc Quebecois mentioned, that is the need for anti-scab legislation in the federal jurisdiction. There is a campaign on now. I am sure the minister, even though she is new in office, will have inherited a rather large file from her predecessor of letters from all across the country, from locals, regional and provincial federations of
labour and other labour leaders calling for anti-scab legislation in the federal arena.
I would certainly like to add my voice as NDP labour critic to the call for that kind of legislation. I say that in an uncritical way. It may be that the government will bring forward a form of anti-scab legislation that will be unacceptable and will only, as the member said earlier, legalize a form of scab labour by sanctifying the movement of employees in a way that amounts to the same thing. We will wait to see exactly what the minister has in mind.
We know that in those provinces where genuine anti-scab legislation has been brought forward there is a lot less labour-management strife. Management has to bargain. It is not that all management bargains in bad faith, but there are rotten apples. Sometimes they bargain in the knowledge that they can put people out on strike and hire scab labour. When that kind of legislation is in place they cannot do that and they have to bargain in good faith. I hope we will see very soon from the government legislation in that regard.
In my riding a strike has been ongoing for two and a half years. I see the same guys walking back and forth in front of the Northern Blower plant in my riding. I believe this is their third winter. They are dealing with a company that has absentee ownership that does not care. It will not bargain. It has scab labour in there. These guys have been in this situation for a long time. If we had that kind of legislation in the provincial domain in Manitoba they would not be in that kind of situation. It is wrong for that to happen to people. I hope that we will see anti-scab legislation in those provinces which do not now have it and at the federal level.
Just the other day I went to the shopping centre in my riding. A fellow stopped me as I came out. The projectionists at Famous Players theatres are on strike. They are being asked by a company that I understand is making good profits to take a 60 per cent cut in wages.
What is going on when companies can ask people to take this kind of beating in their standard of living, particularly when those companies are making money? The company has brought in other people to run the projectors. If it was not able to do that it would have to bargain more seriously with its workers and would not be able to demand these kinds of concessions from them.
I have mentioned the situation of the lockout when it comes to the west coast. We have a similar thing happening at CP Rail right now. The brotherhood of maintenance workers decided to have a series of rotating or geographically isolated strikes, not to shut down the whole system, but to demonstrate anger at the situation without endangering the economy as a whole. What did the company do? The company locked the workers out. The company tries to create a crisis.
Obviously we do not have the crisis yet that the company wants. I am sure it would like to see back to work legislation but I would try to counsel in the same vein as others counselled the minister yesterday. Why not try to do something now about the situation facing us with respect to the railways rather than waiting until the situation develops further?
I am not talking about back to work legislation. I am talking about bringing the parties together and knocking some sense into the railways. They cannot expect railway workers to give up the kind of employment security benefits they negotiated. The workers gave up things for that security at the bargaining table years ago.
The railways cannot have it both ways. They cannot have asked employees in the past to give up certain benefits in order to get employment security and then at some point down the road say: "Do you know that employment security we gave you in return for all those things, well, we want it back. However we are not interested in giving back to you any of the things that you gave us in order to receive employment security".
I have a final comment. These debates always illustrate the kind of philosophical gap that exists between how we interpret the actions of working people and how we interpret the actions of people with money.
I heard the member for Wild Rose talk about the young business couple in his riding being held hostage by, in this case I presume, the longshoremen. I heard somebody else talk about the fact that a small number of people can hold up the whole country in this way. I understand that argument.
Why do we not have the same sense of offence when a small number of money speculators can hold the whole country hostage? Why do we not take the same offence at the small number of currency traders, the global casino operators? Why do we not take the same offence when they say: "I am not getting a high enough interest rate out of you, Canada, so I am going to undermine your economy".
Why is their economic freedom and their self-interested economic judgment to be respected and appeased? Why do we listen for instance to members of the Reform Party get up in the House even today and say: "We have to do what these money markets want us to do". Why is their economic self-interest sacred and yet the economic self-interest of longshoremen is held in a different category, if not in contempt?
I say not just to the Reformers because I have seen this happen long before they arrived here but we make this distinction. When working people say: "I will withdraw my labour because I
am not satisfied with the return I am getting on it," we say: "Don't be so unreasonable. Think of the entire economy. Think of the shippers, think of the small businessmen, think of the people you are hurting".
However, when a money speculator or a currency trader or an investor says: "I withdraw my investment. I withdraw my money from this situation because I am not happy with what I am getting," we say: "That is the way the world works, you had better get used to it". This is a double standard that ought to be exposed.
We must treat both arguments for economic self-interest equally. I would be quite prepared to live in a world where unions, like everyone else, were made accountable to the common good. But I am not prepared to live in a world where unions get the argument that they have to take everyone else's welfare into account while money speculators, investors and everyone else can just do whatever in hell they like and that is called reality. No way.
