Dick Proctor

[Canada Labour Code, April 29th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Bill C-328, put forward by my colleague from the Bloc Quebecois, the hon. member for Laurentides.

This bill would prohibit the hiring of replacement workers during a strike or lockout and provides for the reinstatement of workers following a strike or lockout.

For many years the labour movement and the New Democratic Party have called on the federal government to ban the use of replacement workers during strikes and lockouts. Our federal party has passed resolutions demanding the government amend the Canada Labour Code to prohibit the use of scabs.

This private member's bill, introduced by the member for Laurentides, goes a long way toward achieving what our party believes regarding the use of replacement workers. If it were enacted, it would put an end to a practice that subjects trade union members to insult and unfairness, not to mention financial injury, and frankly stacks the labour relations deck in favour of management and against working men and women. For those reasons alone we will be supporting the bill.

Experience has shown that the prohibition on the use of strikebreakers has contributed to civilized industrial relations during work stoppages and it has also reduced the number of workdays lost due to strikes or lockouts. On the other hand, strikes and lockouts accompanied by the employer's use of replacement workers gives rise to several negative and unnecessary strains on the labour-management relationship, including prolonged and more bitter conflicts, more strikes and lockouts, not fewer, increased picket line confrontations and violence, less free and meaningful collective bargaining, and problems that actually make the problem more severe rather than ease the transition.

I recall a garbage strike that happened more than three decades ago in Ottawa. At that time I was working for the Canadian Union of Public Employees. The City of Ottawa decided in its wisdom to contract out the garbage pickup in Ottawa to a private company, and its first goal was to break the union. I say without fear of contradiction that it was a terrifying situation. The city police were called in. It was bitter and tense. There was damage on both sides and fortunately, people finally came to their senses and order was restored.

Those are the kinds of things that can happen when things do get out of hand. I would observe that these strains are often more pronounced in smaller bargaining relationships where the tradition of labour-management negotiations is not as embedded as in other labour-management negotiations.

The Canada Labour Code as it stands is weak on the issue of replacement workers. It prohibits their use as long as the employer appears to be negotiating with the union.

We look forward to having the member's bill examined in committee and discussing other amendments to the Canada Labour Code. These amendments would include prohibiting the use of both bargaining unit and non-bargaining unit employees, or any person, including those persons who have exercised managerial functions; prohibiting the use of persons engaged, transferred or hired after the earlier date on which the notice of intent to bargain is given and the date on which bargaining actually begins; prohibiting contracting work out of the establishment; providing protection from discipline for any person who honours a picket line; and an enforcement mechanism that would include permission for the union to enter and inspect the employer's premises in the company of a government labour relations officer and representative of the employer.

Our caucus believes that these are all achievable goals. They arise from a deeply rooted philosophy and are really a matter of political will.

A NDP government in Ontario passed Bill 40 prohibiting the hiring of replacement workers. The implementation of Bill 40 resulted in fewer work stoppages, moderate union demands at the bargaining table and civilized picket lines.

This piece of legislation that was introduced by the Bob Rae government in Ontario, of course, did not stand the test of time. It was immediately repealed by the Conservatives under Mike Harris when they came to power in 1995. We note that labour-management relations have not improved as a result. In fact, they are going in the opposite direction.

It is important to acknowledge this, perhaps especially today because as members know a new government in Quebec is being sworn in. I would predict that there will not be significant changes in the labour laws in that province as a result of the Liberals replacing the Parti Québécois. Why? Because it has been proven to work in Quebec.

The banning of scabs or replacement workers during confrontations or during labour-management disputes that occur in Quebec that fall under provincial legislation has worked well. We have seen it when the Liberals were in power in Quebec. There was no significant change to that legislation.

I fully expect that the Charest government will continue to honour that. We need to learn from the province of Quebec and how it has indulged in labour-management relations over quite a considerable period of time. It seems to be working well. We cannot seem to get it right in English Canada.

Any time replacement workers are used it seems to undermine the capacity of a union to represent its striking or locked out workers. Any uncertainty here could and should be resolved by a straightforward general prohibition on the use of replacement workers during strikes and lockouts as the bill calls for.

As I indicated, the labour code needs to be amended to explicitly prohibit the use of scabs. The New Democratic Party supports any and all legislation that respects workers' rights. For that reason we are pleased to support the bill proposed by the member for Laurentides.

Before I conclude, I listened to the member's speech and heard what she had to say about the three year strike at Cargill and the strike that went on for far too long at Vidéotron. Again, these are contrasts where the provincial legislation in Quebec did not apply. It was federal legislation. The Cargill strike was three years and Vidéotron was 10 months or something like that. This is unique in the province of Quebec. It happens because it falls under federal legislation as opposed to provincial legislation.

I listened as well to the member from the Alliance from British Columbia. He did not quite say that we do not need unions anymore. He did say that there was a time when unions were needed in this country. He went on to talk about final offer arbitration. He forgot or failed to mention that more than 90% of all negotiations are settled amicably without a strike or a lockout.

For the notion that firefighters would stand by while a house was burning down or a child was burning up, as it were, is simply ludicrous. When we have situations like that where essential workers are permitted to go on strike or are locked out, then essential services are provided as well. The trade union movement has been very good in this country, and I would say around the world, at ensuring that essential services are carried out when there is a strike or a lockout in progress.

This is a good piece of legislation and I would urge all members of the House of Commons to support it.

[Health and Safety, April 29th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to emergencies and disasters, firefighters are always among the first responders, and the level of training they have will, to a great extent, determine the level of danger for the population.

In the 1990s American firefighters developed a highly successful training the trainer program for hazardous materials, including weapons of mass destruction, and biological and nuclear hazards. Canadian firefighters want to import the program but await an answer.

I ask the minister responsible for emergency preparedness when his government will provide the modest half million dollars necessary for Canadian firefighters to participate in this hazardous training program.

[Community Activity Support Fund, April 10th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, there are some solutions to this. Ottawa must consult openly with farm organizations and provincial governments to provide new safety net programs that would be acceptable to the industry. The government must protect the incomes of Canadian farmers and producers, and that means doing more than simply acknowledging the impact of American and European subsidies.

We need a food production system that would allow Canadian farmers to earn a decent living. We need a policy that would create some economic stability and job creation in rural Canada. We are on the verge of doing permanent damage to agriculture and the future of agriculture. It is our responsibility to ensure that we protect the industry and enhance the lives of those who live in rural Canada.

I would urge the government and the minister to consult in a meaningful way with farmers, farm organizations, and provincial and territorial governments to put agriculture on a firm footing for both today and tomorrow.

[Community Activity Support Fund, April 10th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it has been said by a former minister of agriculture in this place that if three farmers were to agree, two of them would have to be dead first. When it comes to the agricultural policy framework, the government has managed the near impossible, because farm leaders are virtually unanimous in their opposition to the risk management program being foisted upon them by the federal Department of Agriculture.

At a time when farm incomes are under severe stress, at a time when farmers really need a safety net, the government is proposing new safety programs that offer considerably less than what has existed heretofore. Does this happen at a time when agriculture is booming? Hardly.

The first thing to say is that farmers and rural communities are hurting as never before. Realized net farm income across Canada for 2002 will be well below that of the previous year and certainly below the five year average. In the province of Saskatchewan where I come from, realized net farm income is predicted to reach record low levels when the numbers are announced late next month.

We would expect under such circumstances that a government with a handsome surplus would be coming to the assistance of farmers in their time of need but that is not what is happening. Federal spending on agriculture today is approximately half of what it was just a dozen years ago. In terms of total government spending, the amount spent on agriculture has fallen from 2.8% of overall spending 12 years ago to 1.4% in the current budget.

About 10 months ago the Prime Minister announced the agricultural policy framework with great fanfare. He said Ottawa was providing more than $5.2 billion toward a long time fix for agriculture. The fix was that much of the new money so-called, was earmarked for items in the agricultural policy framework, things such as improving water supplies, environmental plans and export markets but very little actually went into the pockets of farmers to help solve the drought and the cost price squeeze that they face.

To make matters worse, we have the high subsidies from international areas, the United States and Europe in particular. The United States is now subsidizing pulse crops. There is no other country in the world that subsidizes pulse crops except the dear old U.S.A.

Canadian farmers are suffering a trade injury that amounts to an estimated $1.3 billion a year as a result of these subsidies. Farmers and their organizations, as well as provincial governments, have been pleading with the government to provide compensation to cover off that amount. However, the Minister of Agriculture went out of his way last June to say that the APF did not relate to trade injury, a point that was reinforced in the recent federal budget.

Farmers and farm organizations and provincial governments were all uneasy about last June's announcement. They heard the sizzle; they have not yet seen the steak and they are definitely not eating much of it.

The new agricultural policy will revamp NISA and will put a greater emphasis on crop insurance. Farmers have done their homework and they find that in the future they will be paying more and receiving even less in disaster protection than they currently receive.

The government, we would submit, is engaged in a public relations smokescreen to create an illusion that there is genuine consultation while all the while the department intends to go its own way on a policy that is really aimed at allowing the government to spend less in perpetuity on the farm community. Some 22 groups took the highly unusual step of bypassing the agriculture minister completely and writing directly to the Prime Minister. They told him in effect that they were being ignored.

They asked and the provinces have asked that the current safety net programs be allowed to remain in place for an additional period of time, one more year, while real consultations and negotiations occur. The minister kept promising that he would have new--

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, April 10th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-9, an act to amend the Environmental Assessment Act.

As we look at this first group of motions at report stage, it is useful to provide a bit of background to the bill that came about as a result of the requirements of the mandatory statutory review requirements set out in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act that was proclaimed 11 years ago and came into force in January 1995.

A section of the current act required that the minister responsible for the environment undertake a comprehensive review of the provisions and operation of the act five years after its coming into force. It also and required that within one year after the review, the minister submit a report on the review to Parliament, including a statement of any recommended changes.

Discussions and consultations took place between December 1999 through March 2000, and the precursor to this bill was tabled a couple of years ago.

At the outset the review was fundamentally flawed. We felt that the minister's report failed to address significant deficiencies revealed over the five year history of the Environmental Assessment Act and we initially opposed the bill based on the assertion that it did fail to address three principal criteria.

First, the current Environmental Assessment Act did not go sufficiently far enough to protect our environment and the changes proposed in Bill C-9, in our opinion, would weaken the legislation additionally.

Second, the legislation before us attempted to streamline and speed up the environmental assessment and review process but we felt seemingly to the primary benefit of developers and industry instead of protecting the environment and the public.

Third, the bill did not substantively address the measures needed to strengthen and improve safeguards to protect our fragile environment.

During debate on the bill and throughout committee hearings, my colleague, the member for Windsor—St. Clair, raised these and many other concerns regarding the lack of effectiveness, the lack of transparency and the inefficiency in the environmental assessment process. After reviewing the legislation and consulting with a variety of environmental, aboriginal and legal experts, that member submitted more than 50 amendments to Bill C-9 at the committee stage. The amendments attempted to redress some of the shortcomings that we had identified in the act. Most of those amendments were defeated and the bill that has returned from committee and is before us this afternoon has failed to address those concerns. They included predictability and timeliness for all participants in the process. It also failed to address enhancing the quality of assessments and ensuring more meaningful public participation.

Although the bill and the amendments partially address some of the concerns relating to the efficiency of the process, it is unclear to us how the effectiveness or transparency of the environmental assessment process will be improved through this legislation.

Many groups and individuals commented on the need to review the entire environmental assessment process. In fact, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, in its submission to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, commented on the need for review of the entire process and not simply to limit the scope to amendments made in the bill. It stated:

--in its current form, CEAA will continue to be applied to fewer projects, with little or no opportunity for meaningful public involvement.

While Bill C-9 attempts to address some of the glaring inadequacies of the Environmental Assessment Act, it does not specifically address the shortcomings of the process.

While we would agree that there are some recommendations and issues within the report that we support in principle, we are unable to endorse the complete document because it fails to address the concerns that were laid out so clearly at the committee stage by the member for Windsor—St. Clair.

Unfortunately, the final report has been watered down over the course of numerous revisions. It appears that many of the concessions made during the drafting of the report were aimed at appeasing the Privy Council and the Prime Minister's Office instead of forcefully addressing the inadequacies of the environmental assessment process. We maintain that the changes proposed in the bill and report will move environmental assessment toward the lowest common denominator, much as our free trade agreements have done in other areas.

It is also regrettable that the report, which contains some strong wording in the text, lacks similarly forceful wording within its recommendations. The recommendations are just that and there is nothing compelling the government to actually act upon them.

As indicated earlier, one of our principal concerns was with the streamlining or harmonization of the environmental assessment process. Our concerns about harmonization seem to have been justified as the report includes section 1.3 which cites a provincial and federal harmonization agreement as an example of addressing the issues of co-operation, uncertainty and duplication of effort.

In fact, when we attempted to introduce amendments to create a greater certainty and less duplication of effort, they were defeated by members opposite at the committee stage.

The committee did hear considerable evidence to suggest that the federal environmental assessment is indeed not “making a significant contribution to sustainable development”. The report, however, contains no meaningful recommendations for immediate changes to the process or for ensuring that changing the process would be given the highest priority in any subsequent review of the act.

Another instance of where we dissent from the findings of the report is in section 2.3 which states:

--the Committee felt that the goals of Bill C-9 were laudable, and that the bill should improve CEAA and federal EA as a whole.

We remain skeptical and unconvinced that the bill will make meaningful improvements to the stated objectives in the process. In fact, the bill does not even address adequately the three goals outlined by the minister when it was first introduced.

Another area where we disagree is in section 2.8 which states:

This report examines areas where the current federal approach has not succeeded, sets out a number of important challenges that remain to be addressed, and provides recommendations on what should be done. The report deals with the basic questions. In short, how can the federal EA process be improved to better meet the goals of sustainable development?

The report does not deal with the entire environmental assessment process and meeting the goals of sustainable development. Nothing in the report or the bill provides consequential reassurances that deficiencies within the Environmental Assessment Act and process will be remedied.

Throughout the examination of Bill C-9 the committee heard witnesses discuss problems with self-assessments, the failure of the regulatory authority to trigger an environmental assessment in a timely fashion and the lack of meaningful, timely public participation. These problems are not addressed adequately in the bill nor in the recommendations contained in the report. The report also lacks meaningful recommendations requiring enforcement or oversight mechanisms to ensure that federal authorities comply with the act.

These are just some illustrations of how we feel the report and the bill fail to deal with Canadians' stated concerns on our fragile environment.

It is disappointing that so much time and hard work has been dedicated to such a meagre piece of legislation as we see before us. The committee heard from numerous witnesses on the need to simplify the process. In the final analysis, Bill C-9 does little to meet these objectives and Canadians are left with a complex, confusing and basically inaccessible piece of legislation. Given the shortcomings of the act and the amending legislation, we recommend that an entirely new Environmental Assessment Act be introduced, an act that would create an environmental assessment process that would be efficient and allow for public participation.

We oppose this. Unfortunately and regrettably we have to stand in opposition to it. In conclusion I would simply say that we cannot support Bill C-9 or the recommendations of the report of the standing committee. We in this caucus would say that we need to leave a much softer footprint on our fragile environment. We did not simply inherit this planet from our ancestors. We are preserving it for our children and their children, and in that vein we are in opposition to Bill C-9.

[Steel Industry, April 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, low priced steel coming into Canada from several countries is resulting in downsizing and threatens the future of the entire Canadian steel industry.

Both steelworkers and producers want Canada to impose significant tariffs on underpriced imports just as the American government did one year ago. Instead, worried yet again about possible WTO repercussions, the government's only response is to shuffle responsibility back and forth between finance and international affairs.

Would the finance minister tell us when the government plans to galvanize itself into action on this important issue?

[Agriculture, March 25th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, Agriculture Canada is using a Saskatchewan research station to test GM wheat from Monsanto. Incredibly, conventional wheat is also grown on that experimental farm, which leads to the real fear of contamination. Canadian Wheat Board customers want no part of GM wheat or conventional wheat that has been contaminated.

Why is the government putting at risk our conventional wheat, the best in the world, by testing GM wheat on experimental farms? Second, what assurances can the government give that these GM wheat tests will be discontinued immediately?

[Supply, March 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by congratulating the member and the former minister on a very comprehensive speech.

He said that winning the peace may be more difficult than winning the war. My question for him is on that basis.

The New York Times reported in its edition yesterday that only American contractors would be allowed to bid on the restoration of Iraq. Could the member for York Centre comment on that?

[Agriculture, March 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is always difficult to reach consensus among farmers but the government has managed the near impossible. Farm leaders are unanimous in their opposition to the risk management program being foisted on them in two weeks, saying the proposals are much worse than what exists now. With 22 major Canadian farm groups arguing they have not been listened to, the only farmers the department has not alienated are those it has not met.

Farmers want current safety net programs to remain in place for one more year. What is wrong with this very reasonable request by Canadian farmers?

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Peterborough was listening but he was not listening very carefully because I did deal with agriculture in the first part. I did mention that there was money for things like the Canadian Grain Commission, like veterinarian colleges and two or three other things to which the member referred. What I tried to say, and would stand by 100%, was that there was no money put into the pockets of farmers to help them out of an enormously difficult time, which has gone on for too long and for several years.

The point is there is less money coming up in the new budget with the new NISA program than was available under the old CFIP program. The government has managed to have 22 farm organizations saying that it should delay the agriculture policy framework, the business risk management plan, because it will not provide even the same very modest levels of support that the old AIDA program provided and more recently, the CFIP plan provided.

I did not ignore what the member was alleging but I was trying to put it in perspective that there is no money for Canadian farmers in the budget introduced last month.

With respect to post-secondary education, all the student organizations across the country are very concerned about the hikes in tuition fees, and it comes as a direct result. As I was trying to say in referencing this, there needs to be a partnership between the provinces and the federal government, not between the federal government and business or the provinces and business. Let us do it government to government. Let us get back to established program financing the way it was many years ago where it was mostly a fifty:fifty arrangement. We have gone a long way back from that on health care. We have gone in the same direction on post-secondary.

It is time that the federal government stepped up to the plate. Yes, money for research is good but it is the young people who are entering university, the undergraduates, the people in the liberal arts education who are not getting the same kind of access to education as they did in the past.