Vic Althouse

[Department Of Health Act, November 6th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, on October 19 I questioned the minister of public works regarding some problems over the summer with harassment of a female engineer on the job site outside the Peace Tower.

The ministry of public works subsequent to that harassment rewarded one of the subcontractors with further work, including the whole of the Centre Block. I was wondering why the minister would allow his officials to do that. He replied that "notwithstanding the fact it is beyond the legal ramifications of the Government of Canada in terms of privity of contract, we will ensure this kind of behaviour is not tolerated".

Since that time it has come to my attention that officials at public works have been closing their eyes to this sort of behaviour for some time. In fact, this same company, Colonial Builders, and Mr. Karmash who is the perpetrator on this site, have been active on other sites in previous summers, including the Kingston military college and the Kingston penitentiary. Harassment of another female engineer took place to the point where her supervisor took over because it was virtually impossible to work with the subcontractor on the site. He would simply have nothing to do with a female on his job site.

Public works should have been aware of this pattern of behaviour, yet it has continued to permit the company and this individual to do work of very great importance since that time, including work on the Parliament Buildings.

Public Works officials have not shown much competence or judgment, not only in this matter but in other matters related to it. The minister is aware that the female engineer's crew walked off in sympathy with her plight and were left being owed $165,000 or thereabouts. Public works officials have not acted there either.

In order to receive pay for work completed, the contractor and subcontractor have to fill out statutory declarations. They swear that all work they are billing the government for has been completed and that all payments have been made. The statutory declarations could not have been very accurate on the Peace Tower project because if the declarations were true, the group of workers who were with Ann Raney and who are still owned some $165,000 would have been paid. Yet the statutory declaration stating that all accounts are paid and up to date have been submitted and paid by Public Works Canada.

That they are owed the money is not in dispute. The court has in fact found in their favour and has permitted a lien to be placed against the Peace Tower project. Surely that should tell officials at the department of public works that something is wrong. The minister should be aware and should be making certain that he finds out why his officials are so lax in their duties. Not only does public works appear to support and justify the harassment of women on the worksite, but it appears to be ignoring the basic management and accounting procedures that are its role as well.

I call on the minister to assure us that his department will act honourably and see to it that justice is done in this case. These workers who had the strength of character to do the right thing in resisting the unfairness of the harassment against their female engineer must not be the only Canadians who resist harassment of females on the worksite.

The public and this House expect nothing less than fair treatment and justice from our government departments and from their officials. The minister must act now.

[Employment Equity, October 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, many times in the House by legislative and constitutional means members have presented laws by example to get people to recognize that we should have sexual equality in this country. Yet, right outside of these doors during the months of August and September, a female engineer was harassed off the job by her subcontractor. We did not see any reaction in the House, or very little. Two hundred and ninety-five of us let this happen.

We did see to their credit her fellow workers put everything on the line. They walked off the job in protest leaving $165,000 worth of back pay, $15,000 or $18,000 worth of equipment here on the site, which public works will not let them take off.

We should be involved directly. This is our jurisdiction. This is happening under our eyes with our feet-

[Public Works, October 19th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister of public works. During this summer's

renovations to the Peace Tower, the general contractor, Fuller, subcontracted to Karmash, who contracted Ray Wolfe to do masonry work. Wolfe's female engineer, Anne Raney, was subsequent harassed off the job by Karmash.

Given the government's commitment to equity in the workplace and given this workplace is within the jurisdiction of Parliament Hill, literally outside our doors, why did the minister of public works subsequently reward such unacceptable behaviour by granting Fuller and Karmash contracts for the rest of Centre Block even after the Raney incident?

[Employment Equity Act, October 16th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, on October 3, I rose to put a question to the minister of agriculture asking him to justify the apparent changes in policy direction that have occurred with regard to the $1.6 billion ex gratia payment to offset the decline in farmland prices that would result from cutting the Crow benefit. It was contained in the budget. It appeared that the $1.6 billion would go to land owners free of current capital gain tax. It would simply accrue to the land and therefore would not be taxable in the year received.

Since that time a number of changes occurred. Some of them were hinted at in the budget speech but others were simply outright decisions that were made, notably changes to permit people who were renting the land to apply for some of the payment. However there was no similar treatment for those people in terms of a share they might negotiate from the land holder. Any share they might negotiate from the owner of the land would be taxable as income in the year received.

They could not apply it to any land or property they might own now and were therefore treated differently. Because about 40 per cent of land in most provinces is rented it seems to some observers like a rather clever and devious way for the government to collect income tax on money it had announced was to be paid out on a non-taxable basis. That is one complaint that I raised.

The other was that there seemed to be a very ill defined standard for what lands would be eligible. It looked as if all farmland, presumably land that was cultivated at one time or now and used for crops, would under the government's estimation lose value. Therefore this payment was presumably to go to those lands. Yet as the nature of the program became clearer land seeded to permanent crops, forage, alfalfa and so on, were not eligible simply by definition somewhere throughout the system.

Yet crops that were to be used for forage, such as barley or oats for cattle feed or livestock feed either as silage or as grain, are eligible. Even stranger, summer fallow which grows absolutely nothing was eligible on the same basis as land that was growing crops. This seemed to run contrary to everything the Department of Agriculture had been attempting to convey to farmers over the previous 10 or 15 years, namely to get into a diversity of crops, to plant crops that would hold the soil in place and keep down wind erosion. They were encouraging continuous cropping to keep stubble. I would submit that forage crops are also a form of continuous cropping. They hold the stubble and the ground. They are part of the diversification program, not only for use within the country but also for export.

The government and perhaps some of the farm organizations that were negotiating with the government left those farmers off the list. I wanted to raise that in question period and again this evening in the adjournment debate.

[Employment Equity Act, October 16th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to this bill on employment equity, a concept with which I have no problem. We still need in our society, however enlightened it might tend to be, some recognition that not all aspects of our society are as accepting of visible minorities, aboriginals, females, people with handicaps in the workplace or in our society as is generally perceived to be most appropriate.

I have no objection in society attempting to use the law as is being proposed in the equity bill to force this sort of compliance to avoid discrimination for any of the reasons this proposal lists.

I am therefore basically in support of the idea of employment equity and the requirement that employers give equal opportunity for all people regardless of the circumstances of their birth or what life may have imposed on them by way of disability after birth.

However, the bill has not done a good job of looking at the global economy of the new world order we are now living in, which has presented a much different form of employment than what this bill and what most of the legislation that governments have put together deal with. These kinds of bills and laws function on an employer-employee relationship. They are virtually toothless when it comes to a new world where more and more people are self-employed, where contracting, subcontracting and subcontracting the subcontracting goes on, so there are three, four and five levels of contract.

As a consequence of that new practice it is virtually impossible to supply the kind of protection this bill proposes to do. If members do not believe me they should walk outside of the doors of this House. There is a program going on, the Peace Tower project, in which we have seen the most blatant treatment of an employee because she was female. The House, on whose territory this injustice took place, appears to be unable or unwilling to do anything about it. It is under the aegis of the Speaker but he seems unable to do anything. The job was contracted by the minister of public works who cannot find 10 minutes of time to even discuss it with me and whose officials actually aided the ejection of this woman and her fellow workers from the site. They had to leave their tools which they cannot recover.

The several times they have attempted to recover the tools employees of Public Works and Government Services Canada have told them that they are disrupting the building site and that they cannot have their tools because the current contractor is using them to complete the job. The contractor forced them to leave the job site because they insisted on using a female engineer.

If we are going to be believable in this Chamber in trying to deal with questions of inequality in the workplace we are going to have to recognize that very often in this new world order the workplace is run by people who have subcontracted and subcontracted those contracts to the point that it is impossible to hold the employer who makes those kinds of decisions, however arbitrary, unfair and normally illegal, responsible. We cannot do anything about it.

As a consequence, the subcontractor has forced the building trades people, the masons who were working on the Peace Tower, off the job because they persisted in using a female engineer. He had no objection to her work. He was only objecting because she was female. He made that quite clear. He forced them off the job. They left their tools and they cannot recover them. They can go to court. They have due process. I have talked to members on the government side who have said: "Use due process, that is what you have to do".

Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, you are aware that due process in this case is almost useless because her employer, the mason that hired her to be the engineer for his part of the project, is not the person who is forcing her off the site but the subcontractor above him. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has some trouble dealing with this.

Others have advised me. Others of the legal profession from the government side have said: "Look to the federal human rights commissioner. He is obviously the one who has to do this because it is on a federal site and it is for the federal houses of Parliament for Pete's sake". Again the person that has pushed her off the site is not her employer and there seems to be nothing that the human rights commissioner can do in the case of this injustice.

I raised this briefly at second reading and I remind members on all sides that if this kind of injustice is to be permitted on our own grounds literally and figuratively and we can do nothing about it, what is the point of replicating the same type of legislation using the same requirements only on employers versus employees without taking into account the contractors and the subcontractors and all the other permutations that occur in business?

What are we really accomplishing? We are accomplishing very little except perhaps to make the whole process and the whole political group of us in the House look rather silly.

I keep preaching from my far corner. Very few people are in the House when I do my little rant on these things, but I hope the new ears hearing this each time take this to the rest of their colleagues and see if there is some way we can force compliance if not across the country at least on the acres of yard in front of the House.

This is a great injustice and makes the whole process of attempting to get employment equity to permit females equal access to jobs as engineers or scientists or doctors or lawyers. It makes the whole process of the last 15 or 20 years look absolutely ridiculous.

This woman is apparently considering going back to washing dishes because that is the only employment she can find at the moment. She had a job as an engineer. The subcontractor hiring her firm to work on the Peace Tower forced it off the job because it persisted in employing a woman engineer.

For his efforts that subcontractor was rewarded with a further subcontract to work on the whole House of Commons instead of just the Peace Tower after he engaged in this process.

I cannot let any debate or any discussion of an equity employment bill go by without reminding members of the House, and I hope some of the frontbenchers will take this to heart, that we have allowed a grave injustice just outside our doors. If any of the laws we pass in this place are to be taken seriously by people outside of Ottawa, we should be able to enforce what we have already made law numerous years ago when work gets done on our buildings on the confines of Parliament Hill.

Until that happens I am afraid I will look sceptically at this new effort at achieving employment equity.

[Employment Equity Act, October 3rd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is part of the government. I would hope she would stay for just a few moments because I want to back up some of what she just said.

There are some things she could do as a government member that ought to be done with regard to a certain problem that has developed literally outside the doors of this Chamber. As we all know, a construction program is going on outside. Fuller Construction has a renovation job. It has subcontracted to another contractor who has in turn subcontracted some more to a unit run by Ray Wolf. He apparently made the mistake of having a 32-year old female engineer named Ms. Raney in charge of the project. The intermediate contractor forced Mr. Wolf to quit the job because he was using a female engineer.

Since the hon. member is part of the government I would hope she is listening to this and will do what she can to intervene to make certain this injustice is corrected.

I realize the interim construction company is headed by someone from the Middle East who has a different view of the role of women than some of the rest of Canadian society. However, we live under Canadian law. These are the Canadian Houses of Parliament his company is working on. Surely there could be more ability to recognize people on merit rather than to discriminate against them because a company chooses to use a female engineer.

I do not want to say very much more about this legislation. I am just so angry this kind of thing can happen here on the grounds of Parliament Hill that I wanted to make sure it was raised after someone who has been a firm and loud protector of the equality of women as is the member for Halifax who preceded me.

I was hoping I could add some fire to her usual ability to get things done that would have her take on this case and see if the minister of public works cannot correct this great injustice which has no place in the Parliament of Canada or in this country.

[Agriculture, October 3rd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food.

The 1995 budget proposed a $1.6 billion ex gratia payment to offset the decline in farmland prices that would result from cutting the Crow benefit. Later the minister made three basic changes to that budget policy by deleting land seeded to forage crops, by deciding to include renters, and by deciding that those renters would pay income tax on their payments.

What was the rationale for these changes and how are these decisions consistent with the original budget allocation?

[Canadian Wheat Board, September 21st, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food.

The northern hemisphere's grain harvest is near completion, indicating little change in global supplies that should dampen the current, strong rising price trend. Because of the rising prices, can the minister tell the House why the government persists in maintaining wheat board initial prices for wheat and barley that are about one dollar a bushel below the open market domestic price? Is he trying to undermine the wheat board system?

[Manganese Based Fuel Additives Act, September 19th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, for the last number of years I have been involved along with the former member from London, Ralph Ferguson, in pushing the issue of better acceptance and more use of ethanol, one of the alternate octane enhancers to MMT.

I believe we were very close to passing, if we did not pass in the House in the last Parliament, a private member's motion to accept ethanol as a replacement for MMT. There was a lot of support at that time for replacement of MMT for many of the reasons the parliamentary secretary has outlined for us today.

At that time we were not made aware of the EPA's requirement to review the whole question of MMT because of the court ruling. However, one of the things we were trying to use at that time from the farm production point of view was the fact that ethanol was a very good replacement. It was renewable and at that point there was a surplus of grains, the source of ethanol, and they were very cheap.

Could the minister tell us what the economics of ethanol production has become? I know I have one of the larger ethanol production units in my riding. It is concerned about the sudden increase in the cost of inputs. Grain prices have more than doubled since the time that Ralph Ferguson introduced his bill.

Will this change make a sizeable change to the cost of gasoline because the ethanol may cost more than the MMT and what will the economic costs of such a change be? Has the Department of the Environment looked at the new costs of ethanol given that the raw material going into ethanol production, namely grains, has virtually doubled or more over the last three or four years?

[Integrity, June 20th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, in spite of red book promises to move our political leaders away from questionable behaviour and arrogance, arrogant political leaders are not a thing of the past, unhappily.

Case in point number one: Minister of Transport decides MPs are not qualified to review a restructured deal to automate the air traffic control system. Apparently the bureaucrats, who more than doubled the original cost of the program, are qualified.

Case in point number two: Minister of Agriculture tells the health committee that it does not know what it is doing when it recommends continuing the moratorium on the use of recombinant BST in milking herds due to consumer resistance and concerns about legal liabilities and so on.

Case in point number three: The Prime Minister says integrity and trust are needed in Canada. He tells western Canadians prior to the election that he will protect the Crow benefit better than the Conservatives. Instead of a Conservative cut of 10 per cent, he cuts it 100 per cent.

That is integrity, that is honesty. That is ridiculous.