Jim Gouk

[Cp Rail, March 17th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, 7,000 cargo containers are presently trapped at the port of Montreal at a cost of more that $2 million a day.

Once again business and individuals across the country are being hurt by this situation, some nearly to the point of bankruptcy. Ten days have now passed and the government has done nothing, although it only took them only one day in Vancouver.

Will the Minister of Labour who is an MP from Montreal take action to end this senseless pain and economic hardship?

[Cp Rail, March 17th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to use an urgent situation in my own riding to outline the impact of the CP Rail strike in many ridings both urban and rural across the country.

Kootenay West-Revelstoke has a pulp mill and a smelter both on the verge of complete shutdown because of the week old rail strike. This will take $2.6 million a week out of an area of less than 20,000 people. Not only is this financially devastating; it is totally unnecessary.

My question is for the Minister of Labour. How much economic pain and suffering has to be felt by innocent third parties, everyone from factory workers to prairie farmers, before the government takes its inevitable course of action?

[Borrowing Authority Act, 1995-96, March 3rd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, during the last election the Reform Party ran in many ridings where civil servants would be affected by layoffs. The Reform Party was very honest and said we do have to downsize government. There will be some changes.

The Liberal Party ran against us in those ridings and said: "That brutal Reform Party. We would never do that. The poor civil servants. We would protect their jobs". The word that comes to mind is hypocrisy.

The minister is going to downsize his department. He is quoted in the Ottawa Sun this morning as saying that job cuts based on race or sex are illegal according to the charter of rights.

He says that the department recognizes the need for employment equity, respecting the various proportions that exist now and if possible will increase them.

Is the minister going to use this downsizing of the government to try and bring in some form of equity balancing, or is he going to do it by merit the way the laws of the land say he has to do it?

The article suggests that he is asking the department how it is going to do it. Who is in charge? Is it the minister or is it the bureaucrats? I would like to hear his answer.

[Grain Export Protection Act, March 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today and support Bill C-262. In the course of my speech I will probably deal with some of the things mentioned by the member for Hamilton West.

Going back to the speech by the Bloc Quebecois member, it seemed by the way he spoke that he misunderstood the difference between basic arbitration and being legislated back to work, and having compulsory arbitration and the concept of final offer selection arbitration.

I am surprised the member for Hamilton West so eloquently spoke against this issue, because the Liberal Party imposed this on a strike last year in the Vancouver docks. I am speaking in favour of this type of settlement, but I first want to explain where the Liberal government made two mistakes in the way it did it.

First, the government waited until there was already significant hardship being imposed, not just on a few people and a few on the sidelines who were involved in the strike, but on the whole economic well-being of Canada. Something that started in the port of Vancouver spread across to farmers on the prairies. It almost shut down mills in the interior of British Columbia that were on the edge. It affected hundreds of thousands of people. It is something we have to examine and decide whether there is a better way. As I said, the first problem was that the government took so long to do something about it.

The second mistake is that the employer and employees in that strike situation negotiated. They then took their strike option and were still considerably far apart.

If we are to impose a change of rules, we should give the people an opportunity to readjust to the new rules. The game was changed in midstream. The parties were not given the time to go back to the table to try and resolve it, to see if they could work together more closely.

That is what final offer selection arbitration is inclined to do. It is not a matter of picking and choosing a piece of this or a piece of that when arbitrating a settlement. The way this works is that the final offer is laid on the table by both sides and the arbitrator then picks either one side or the other. In labour negotiations this tends to move the two sides very close together. This is because if one makes an outlandish proposal and the other is being reasonable, the reasonable side's offer will be accepted virtually every time.

I suggest we look at this in terms of protecting the grain industry in Canada. As the member for Hamilton West said, by all means we should start looking at it in a broader sense.

For example, consider that a house is burning down. A fireman stands by on the sidewalk watching the house burn, perhaps while a young child is inside. He does so because the fire department is on strike. All of us accept that as being absolutely unthinkable. So does the fire department and it accepts this kind of responsibility.

Can we accept the concept of a police officer standing by watching someone get mugged or raped because the police department was on strike? We cannot accept this either.

However let us go to the other end of the scale to a small business with little impact on the community and no impact on the national economy. In that situation we say it is okay for it to be a battle of wills and an economic situation for the two forces at work there. We will let the employer or the employee, depending on who comes out the victor, use their position of relative unimportance to negotiate a higher wage or to force the employee to take a lower wage.

The difference between the two is the degree of importance. We are saying that if you are important, we will not let you have the same rights as people who are unimportant. Not only for the sake of the grain industry, I suggest it is time we actually started to look at the whole concept of how we settle labour negotiations in this country.

Unlike what the Bloc member said, this is not an unfair type of action that will cause the relationships between employers and employees to deteriorate. If anything, it may turn it the other way and cause them to negotiate in much better faith and try to resolve the differences between them.

Employees will not be asking for a 100 per cent raise and the employer saying he wants them to take a 50 per cent cut. They are going to try to move to the most reasonable position possible, so that if it comes down to this final offer selection arbitration they are going to have a fairly reasonable offer on the table in the hopes it will be selected. If they are unreasonable, they are likely going to lose. That is the whole concept of this.

The member for Hamilton West talked about how the Public Service Staff Relations Act works. Let me give an example of how it works.

The air traffic control system in this country is not designated as an essential service. The air traffic control system has the right to go on strike, but if it does, it shuts down the entire air industry in Canada.

The government instead said it had the right to go on strike, but in the event of a strike the government has the right to designate a number of employees to maintain the essential service within the air traffic control system. The controllers said they certainly wanted to maintain the safety of this country, hospital flights, food flights to the north, emergencies and these types of things. They would deal with these, and so they said they had no problem with this concept of designating employees.

Then the government turned around and designated every single employee in the air traffic control system and said that the essential duties were everything that they did. It went to court and the court upheld it. A wonderful system. Now the air traffic controllers can go on strike, which means their contract is no longer valid. The government can pay them anything they want to and they still have to report for duty.

We have to find another system. Without getting into the budget argument right now, we are in a very fragile situation

economically speaking and we cannot shut the industry of this country down. In the event of strikes, who loses?

The public loses. They are the number one loser. The second loser is usually labour. No matter what kind of settlement they get, if they are off work for any period of time they are likely not going to make that wage back up. The problem is they have to have some kind of hammer to use as a threat if everything else fails. The majority of the negotiations end up with settlement, but when they do not they always have to have that hammer.

We have to invent a new type of hammer, one that is fair for labour and one that is fair for management. We need some system that says you must move your negotiations very close together or chances are you are going to be the loser in this negotiation.

This is a step in the right direction, examining it in the case of the grain. We do not want to come at this all at once as a total revolutionary system for this country. This is a good place to start. This is a good place to work some of the bugs out of the system.

We do have to look for alternatives. Strikes are something that went on in the 1800s. Surely we have to evolve from something that maybe worked last century. We are about to go into the next one. Maybe we need to find new solutions for this country. This is a system that can work, that the unions will look at and I believe they will accept. The primary objector is going to be one or two people at the very top. I believe the worker in Canada will benefit rather than lose from this type of legislation.

[Province Of Quebec, February 27th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, government officials, whether municipal, provincial or federal, are elected to represent their constituents. Both the Parti Quebecois and Bloc Quebecois do not seem to agree with this. Their idea of a referendum is not to find out what the people of Quebec want but rather how to force them into accepting separation.

Now the PQ and BQ want to water down the question so the issue remains unsettled. This presents a problem for all Canadians, including those in Quebec. Uncertainty is causing interest rates to rise, the dollar to fall and international credit to be re-examined. It is also likely to be partly responsible for the Liberal's failure to properly deal with the deficit for fear of upsetting Quebec.

If the Parti Quebecois does not call the referendum with a clear question on separation within its own 1995 timetable, I call on the Prime Minister to hold a federal referendum in Quebec to settle this issue by year's end. This uncertainty must not continue.

[Points Of Order, February 16th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, it is my understanding that a prop is something that relates to the subject at hand. I held up my speech and I used a piece of stiff cardboard in order to keep the pages from falling over, as they will.

I will not display it now and further incur the wrath of the hon. member, but as it happens there was a label on the back, which we have on briefcases and everything else, which said "No more taxes. No more debt".

I can understand the hon. member's sensitivity to that. It was not my intention-

[Canada Ports Corporation, February 16th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the minister has already claimed to be waiting on a report from the transport committee's study of marine policy before he takes any action.

The purpose of that study is to consult with users to determine how they want their port system changed to make it more viable. Those users have spoken and they have spoken loudly against Arnold Masters.

With this kind of unified opposition, when is the Minister of Transport going to act?

[Canada Ports Corporation, February 16th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the age old problem of patronage under the former Tory government is well known. Now it is coming back to haunt the new masters of patronage, the Liberal government.

Most recently Canada Ports Corporation chairman Arnold Masters has reportedly abused his expense account, billed an unreasonable amount of work and doctored the minutes of the corporation's board of directors.

Now it has been revealed that nearly 50 top executives of shipping companies from Vancouver to Halifax have written to the Minister of Transport calling for Masters' immediate resignation.

When will the Minister of Transport take action on these abuses, take the advice of the Canadian shipping industry and demand the resignation of Arnold Masters?

[Young Offenders Act, February 10th, 1995]

Smoke screens, Mr. Speaker. That is what is coming from the Liberal side all of the time. We see it from the justice minister on the firearms legislation that is proposed. Because it is something he cannot deal with, he comes out with this as a smoke screen to suggest that he is doing something. This motion is no different.

People ask why we oppose something that is a step in the right direction. The problem is that if they take a step they say: "There, we have given you a solution", but we never take the full trip.

The government is going to have to come out with something substantive that will answer the needs of the public, answer the needs of the young people. If it does not, we will never get the final solutions which we require. Half measures have to stop. They do not work. They are only being used as an excuse to cover up the fact that the government does not know what really needs to be done or it does not have the will to do it.

My hon. colleague from the Bloc said that we cannot make the Young Offenders Act tougher, we have to get to the bottom of the problem, find the solutions. Nothing says we cannot work on solving the problems before they come to the justice system. The bottom line is still to protect the rights of law-abiding citizens and their property. Young Offenders Act problems are created mostly against young people. It is the young people we are defending, not oppressing.

[Petitions, December 15th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition signed by residents of Canada.

They point out that Canadian citizens support lawful and responsible use of firearms and ammunition, that many Canadians oppose laws to put more restrictions on the prohibition of legal firearms ownership rather than addressing violent criminal misuse of firearms.

The 1993 Auditor General's report indicates that many firearms regulations were brought in as a matter of public policy with no regard to further effectiveness or potential benefit.

The petitioners call on Parliament not to enact any further firearms control legislation, regulations or orders in council. The petition is signed by 277 residents of Kootenay West-Revelstoke. I highly concur with this petition.