Mr. Speaker, I have such great respect for the House that I would never call one of those members an SOB. Out of decency to them, I would never point out the members who would use such words. I take that under advisement and think it is really important.
However, it speaks to the underlying contempt that this is a manufactured crisis. I look across the way and I see the old Mike Harris wrecking crew. The members of that crew are all sitting there. I saw what they did in Ontario. The only one missing from the gang is the famous John Snobelen. John Snobelen was quite the character. He got a hold of the education system and, while not knowing he was being filmed, said that the government had to manufacture a crisis in order to act. That was the old Mike Harris wrecking crew gang.
What did we see? There was ongoing debate between the postal workers, in their right to collective bargaining with management, and those guys saw the opportunity to manufacture a crisis. What did they do? They locked out the workers. They shut down postal service.
Then Conservative backbenchers start saying, “Look what those bad posties and their union bosses are doing to senior citizens”, even though the postal workers were willing to deliver pensions, “Look how they are destroying business”. Conservatives shut down Canada Post and now they are intervening with legislation that is stripping rights that have been negotiated at the bargaining table.
They say that they are not picking sides. We know on what side those guys have been. They have always been on the side that will undermine the pension system in Canada. They have ridiculed defined pension benefits ever since they have been here.
They are against the right of workers to defend themselves. They tell us in the House that young workers today should be tickled pink that they work three days a week for $12 an hour. My grandfather worked for three days a week at the collieries in the coal mines in Cape Breton. The workers were told that they were lucky they had jobs. Then they started to organize unions because men died so young. It was so bad in Cape Breton, they actually had to go to Timmins to work in the mines. The mines in Timmins were nicer than the mines in Cape Breton. That is how bad it was. The right to collective bargaining was won in Kirkland Lake in the 1941 strike.
The gang of people who have always been on the other side were calling the workers communists and telling them they were lucky to have jobs. They tried to intimidate the miners in Kirkland Lake. Another gang from Ontario sent up 500 police officers with machine guns and marched down the main street of Kirkland Lake in -40° weather. The next day 500 women and children marched back to show the cops that they would not be intimidated.
That is where the right of collective bargaining was won. It was won by people who were blacklisted later, who lost their jobs and homes in that strike. However, they won the principle that people should be able to negotiate legally.
This manufactured crisis by the government is the first step. This is the Wisconsin principle being brought into our country. When a government is allowed to lock out a service, blame the workers and then impose a wage agreement that is less than was negotiated at the table, it has taken the fundamental principle that people in my community and others fought for and literally died for and thrown it out the window.
Do members know why the government thinks it is going to get away with it? Because it thinks the Canadian public is stupid and would love to rise up and kick the local postie. I do not think so. I come from a rural area and know the importance of rural mail. I will tell everyone what people back home have been saying. They have been waiting for these guys to take a run at Canada Post because they do not believe in public institutions.
The cost of a stamp in Kenabeek or Matachewan, Ontario is the same price as it is in downtown Montreal because it is a public system. However, it is not that profitable. It is not profitable to keep little rural post offices. The only reason those guys have not started to cut there is because they know there will be a backlash, so they manufacture a crisis and say that they will fix things. Then they will start hiving off where the easy money is and give it to their friends. That is the neo-con agenda.
Then the Conservatives will say Canada Post really is not all that viable and, of course, union bosses will get blamed again. By that time, what they will have done is sell off the money stream. They have not been able to get away with that because they know rural Canadians will fight for their post offices and would throw any Tory out who tries to mess with it. They needed a crisis and now they have one.
NDP members will debate this as long as it takes. We and our colleagues from Quebec, who are giving up their national holiday to be here, are doing this because we are sending that gang a message. If the Conservatives get away with this one, we will see them go after every collective agreement. Every time there is a strike, we will see them go after the fundamental rights of pensions and defined benefits plans, so we have to stop them.
I was kind of crying on my own shoulder, thinking I would be on the all night shift. I am getting kind of old and do not want to be here at 5:30 in the morning. I was thinking that I wished this would be all nice and we would settle. However, then I thought of the strike at Vale Inco, when those men and women were out for over a year because they were sold out by the government. The government allowed two of the greatest mining corporations in the world, Falconbridge and Inco, to be sold off to corporate raiders. I watched how those workers at Local 6500 stood up because it was the same plant that destroyed their defined benefits plan, that destroyed what they had done for 50, 60 years in the union. The workers at Local 6500 stayed out for over a year.
I remember being out there in January in the cold and their slogan was “One day longer, one day stronger”. They held the line and they pushed back one of the most brutal mining companies in the world. Vale got a black eye, but Vale was aided every step of the way by that gang and the then president of the Treasury Board, who was their friend.
There is a principle here. We are not kidding around. We will be here as long as it takes because we are drawing the line in the sand. The government's world is wrong and we will defend the rights of people to have pensions and decent wages in our country.
