Charlie Angus

[Railway continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy my hon. colleague's interventions because he does remind me that there is still fear of the Bolsheviks out there, at least in his riding.

I would like to take him up on what he is saying. He said that if one does not produce, one gets fired. Fair enough. That is something that working people know in every industry in this country. It is a rule that exists everywhere in this country, except if one is the CEO of a large corporation. If the CEO does not produce, the CEO does not get fired. The CEO gets a golden handshake with a massive golden parachute and a payout of millions and millions of dollars. We have seen that with corporation after corporation. Let us have a bit of accountability here.

What we have seen in terms of these packages that have been given to CEOs over the last 10 years is that it has not created productivity in the workplace. In fact, look at the 1990s when there was massive downsizing in corporations across the country, firings of thousands of workers in operations that were viable, that were done because the CEOs were being paid in stock options. Every time there was a major downsizing, there was a blip in the market and it allowed their own personal stock options to increase. If that is an example of the free market, I would say there is something not quite free about that.

What we have been arguing for is a fair market. We want to ensure that corporate CEOs are accountable not to the shareholders but to society as a whole. We do not see why they should be getting $56 million a year and it should be written off as a normal tax expense.

If companies want to pay that kind of exorbitant, outrageous fee to people who simply are not worth it, and I will repeat it, who simply are not worth it, that is a corporate decision they can make, but they should be fully taxed on it, because they could easily put that money into investing and growing their corporation and being much more viable in the long term. However, we have created this culture of entitlement, a culture actually, to switch gears, of which the Liberal Party has always been in favour, but this is outrageous entitlement, $56 million a year for the kind of service we have seen.

I would like to ask the hon. member, given the recent outrageous number of derailments that we have seen at CN in the last three months, whether he would consider $56 million a year to be a little rich for a CEO of a corporation with that kind of record.

[Railway continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my Liberal colleague says there is a big shortage. I know many people in northern Ontario who would drive a truck but they are not going to drive a truck at the rates that are being paid right now. We have an unfair distorted market thanks to the Conservative government subsidizing industry at the expense of working people.

I am raising this because it is creating pressure on our rail lines which have very large fixed costs. Not only do they have very large fixed costs, but their CEO expects a $56 million a year payout and their shareholders across the U.S. are expecting very high returns on their investment. Once again there is pressure on the bottom line and of course the working families are the bottom line. Unfortunately in this case the bottom line is safety.

Do we see a poisoned atmosphere between management and workers at CN? Unfortunately we do, but it is something that has to be addressed because it is speaking to a larger issue. This is not simply a battle between management and workers. This is not simply about imposing a baseball arbitration and everything will be all right. The disparity that we are seeing in terms of a common vision at CN between workers and management speaks to a much larger problem that is growing in this country, a lack of a transportation vision for this country, a lack of commitment to make the necessary investments in transportation, whether it is in rail or roads, or in my area, for example, in airports where numerous small airports are facing shutting down.

The Conservative government has a laissez-faire attitude toward transportation. It is one area of our economy we cannot simply have a laissez-faire attitude toward because the distances between our regions are vast. As someone who has had to travel from one end of the country to the other many times for my work, I can tell the House that it is quite daunting just to cross the province of Ontario, or cross the Prairies which can sometimes take up to 10 or 12 hours between each major urban centre. Transportation is vital to maintain a viable economy in this country.

This debate we are having today about bringing closure with Bill C-46 is really a debate about the larger issue. CN workers are crying out and saying, “Enough”. This is a company that has not put the necessary investments into its infrastructure. This is a company that is paying its CEO $56 million a year. This is a company that is giving dividends to shareholders across North America. Meanwhile the people on the front lines who are doing the work, who are putting their lives at risk with these train derailments, are not enjoying the prosperity that the CEO and the dividend shareholders are enjoying.

There is obvious anger, which of course brings us to the issue of collective bargaining, the fourth point in my conversation today. Collective bargaining is a very important right. It is a right that was fought for in many communities. The right to collective bargaining was won in my own riding in 1941 in the Kirkland Lake gold strike. Members of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers union stood out on the line month after month through the winter in 1941 and won the right to collective bargaining. After that strike the federal government recognized the right to collective bargaining. That was a hard won right. There was never a strike in any of those years where we did not hear the same kind of claptrap we are hearing from government officials about shutting this down and how essential it is.

Sometimes working families have to draw the line. As the hon. member for Parkdale—High Park said today, there has never been a strike that did not have an economic impact. That is what strikes are. They have economic impacts on both sides. The fact that we are facing that today is too bad, but we have to stand up for the right of collective bargaining.

[Railway continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to this very important issue. It speaks to a number of areas of vital importance for Canadians.

At the outset, I was quite surprised to hear the Liberal Party say that the CEO of CN made $56 million a year. That is completely irrelevant to this discussion. In fact, it cheapens the debate to talk about how much is made at the top. What it signals clearly is how much is being paid out in dividends and how much people are making off the CN line, while the issue of safety is relegated to one of those dead-end tracks. For New Democrats to talk about this incredible disparity and gap is somehow beneath the discussion, but it is very pertinent to the discussion.

I am going to speak about four areas with respect to the bill. There is the issue of safety, which we as New Democrats have raised consistently in this debate. There is a discussion of the need for an infrastructure plan that addresses our industrial capacity and how one part of the country can work with another. There is the question of accountability, both at CN and the government. Then there is the issue of the fundamental right of collective bargaining and how that has to be respected.

I and many Canadians are very close to the whole idea of railways. There is something in our psyche where the sound of the rail hearkens us back to something. I will talk about my family's background in the rails. My mother and father's families either worked in the mines or on the rail lines.

My great-grandfather, John P. McNeil, worked on the Sydney Flyer, bringing the train back into Cape Breton. John P. was apparently quite the man in his day. He claimed he could always tell someone who was bringing booze into Sydney because a man who carried alcohol in his bag put that bag down with just a bit more care than if it were full of underwear. In fact, my grandfather picked up on that. When he would go on a trip, my grandmother would ask him how long he would be away. If he said he was getting a one bottle satchel, that was for one night. If it was a two bottle satchel, that was for the weekend. If it was a four bottle satchel, he was going home to Cape Breton.

My grandfather, like so many men of his generation, left Cape Breton on the CPR. In fact I still have his card. When he was age 17, he travelled on a CPR card to work in the mines of Porcupine. The mines were opened by another railway, the TNO, the time is no option railway, which is now the ONR line. When it was founded, it was built in a very interesting manner. It was built to stop the francophone settlement in northern Ontario. The good burghers of Upper Canada were afraid of all the francophone Catholics coming over the upper part of Lake Témiscaming and had to put some English settlers there. When they hit mileage 103 of the railway line north of North Bay, they hit the largest discovery of silver in North American history, and that opened the mining camps of the north. That is just a side issue, but it shows how much our history is tied up in the railway.

I live at mileage 104. If any people watching TV want to visit me, I am up the street on the rail line from the largest discovery of silver in North American history. Every night the train goes past my house. It carries the sulphuric acid which come from the Rouyn-Noranda smelter and the Kidd Creek smelter. We can hear that train coming it seems like hours in advance of its passing because it is hundreds of cars long.

This leads me to the issue of safety. When a train that long is carrying sulphuric acid, we need to ensure the proper working people on that line to ensure safety. If that train goes over, it is a very serious issue. We just had a spill in the Ontario Northland line this past week and a half on the Blanche River. A sulphuric acid train went over spilling into the Blanche River, causing great concern because it is right in the middle of our dairy farming belt.

Therefore, the issue of safety, when we talk about trains travelling across such a massive distance, is very crucial. It is crucial in terms of this debate because we have to talk about a management philosophy, the philosophy of reinvesting in the infrastructure, which is the second point of my whole discussion today. The management philosophy about safety is important.

I do not want to mix apples and oranges for the folks back home. The sulphuric acid spill accident, about which I spoke, was on the Ontario Northland line, which is not a CN line, but I spoke about it in terms of the issue of safety. When we look at the CN lines and the cars that run on them, some of these trains are two kilometres long, carrying everything from hydrochloric acid, chlorine, sulphuric acid. When we think of all our little towns across the Prairies where the trains run right behind people's backyards, safety has to be number one. These are in a sense two kilometre long missiles carrying these kinds of gases and acids.

When I speak about my number one concern, and that is the issue of safety, we can look at the safety audit that was done on CN Rail. It said that there were numerous problems with safety inspections and with CN's safety management practices. Again, we are getting back to the whole issue of a corporate philosophy.

The auditors found a “significantly high rate of safety defects”, in the order of 54% on the locomotives they inspected, with problems ranging from freight gear defects to too much oil accumulated on locomotive and tanks.

The auditors identified issues relating to rail defects, ranging from damaged rail to rail where there were numerous cases of missing bolts and cracked splice bars.

Train crossings in the audit were another major problem, with 26% of the crossings inspected had inadequate sight-lines. The majority were unprotected crossings. They found major problems all along.

The second phase of the report saw that many front line employees said they felt pressured to get the job done. The audit said that current practices allowed locomotives with safety defects to continue in service.

This leads me to the number three issue that I will speak about, which is accountability. The issue of safety has been raised and the threat that it poses. Since 2000, we have seen a massive escalation in the number of rail accidents on the CN lines. We are not talking about an accident here or an accident there. Any accident of these rail cars with what some of them carry is serious enough. However, when there is incident after incident it goes back to the whole issue of a corporate culture that has to be addressed.

I bring this up today because these are the issues about which the rail workers have spoken. They are concerned about this. I would venture to guess this is part of the problem of the breakdown in relations between management and workers at CN. People on the front line are growing increasingly concerned about the corporate culture, in terms of safety, from the U.S. corporation that is running CN.

Let me talk about the last two months or so.

On January 8, 24 cars of a 122 car freight train derailed at Montmagny, Quebec, 60 kilometres east of Quebec City.

On January 14, there was a derailment near Minisinakwa Lake in northern Ontario, dumping more than 30 cars, one containing paint supplies, into the water.

On February 28, hydrochloric acid spilled from cars on the CP Rail line that went off the tracks in the Kicking Horse Pass canyon.

On March 1, a CN freight train derailment in Pickering disrupted VIA service on the Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa corridor and commuter service into Toronto.

On March 4, grain was spilled near Blue River, British Columbia, two hours north of Kamloops, when 27 cars in the westbound train fell off the track.

On March 10, rail traffic along CN's main freight line through central New Brunswick was disrupted until the next day by a 17 car derailment in the Plaster Rock area.

On March 12, 3,000 VIA passengers had to board buses on the first day of the March break after train service in the Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa corridor was disrupted after a CN freight train derailed near the station in Kingston.

That is quite a sorry little record in the space of only a few short months.

When we ask about accountability of CN management, we have the CEO getting paid $56 million a year. Obviously, the investors think he is doing a good job, which leads us to the growing gap between management and workers at CN because questions of safety have been raised. The question of having adequate staff along the lines has been raised. Yet we see a massive increase in accidents. Therefore, we have to speak about what kind of corporate culture exists in CN where one man gets paid $56 million a year while the workers have to deal with trains that jump off the tracks at an alarming rate.

That is the issue of safety.

There is also the issue of accountability with government. We have seen very little in terms of a government response to growing concerns of public safety. I do not want to speculate about the threat of a major derailment with chlorine gas in an urban area, but we have to start realizing that if something is not done, something could happen.

We are not seeing any action from government. The Transportation Safety Board review rates of accidents are shockingly low. Yet when we talk about what is at stake, we would expect that any of these accidents would involve major inquiries and an examination at every step along the way to ensure that these things did not happen again, but it is not happening.

What we have in this situation is a growing gap of discontent between the people who are on the front lines, the people who are literally risking their lives, and members of upper management, who are paid $56 million a year.

The Liberal Party tells us that a CEO makes $56 million a year is irrelevant. The average Canadian should not bother themselves about that. The little peasant peons that make up the Canadian public should not worry about how these mandarins live in their upper echelon chambers with their $56 million a year payout. I am not speaking about this man in particular, but if any of these CEOs really botch it in particular, they are guaranteed a golden parachute. The average Joe and Josephine citizen back home does not get a golden parachute if they botch it at work. If they botch it at work, they are gone. They are down the road. Of course they are not getting $56 million a year, but then they are also not responsible for safety records like we see at CN.

The second issue about we have to talk about is the need for an industrial infrastructure plan for our country so we look at transportation as a whole.

The hon. member for Eglinton—Lawrence talked about how we were competing against truck driving. That is true. He said that there was a shortage of 30,000 truckers in the country. I live in a part of the country where many families are fed by truckers. Many of my neighbours are truckers. It is interesting, this race to the bottom that we see in the trucking industry. I have truckers telling me that they are having to compete against workers now who are being brought in on HRD projects. Trucking companies do not want to pay a proper rate to haul trucks. Now, suddenly, there is a shortage. Is there a shortage of truckers or is there a shortage of truckers who are willing to drop the price down below what Canadians would do it?

That is the time we see Conservatives intervening in the economy. They do not intervene to help build an economy. They think that is all kind of socialist mishmash. However, when it comes to driving the rates down by bringing in truckers to work at lower rates than an average Canadian could afford, that is a good use of our taxpayers dollars, according to the Conservatives. Bringing these workers in on work contracts is good.

A good friend of mine, who a truckers trying to make a living, applied for a job in a trucking company. It offered him the kilometre rate. He said that he would love to work for the trucking company, but he already had a mortgage on his house. He would have had to take out a second mortgage just so he could work for it. That is unsustainable.

So rail is having to compete against trucking and the trucking rates are being subsidized and driven down with cheap labour. The question is how can we ensure a proper transportation infrastructure when rail with its fixed costs has to compete against trucking continually? We end up with nickel and diming. Rail transportation has to nickel and dime continually in order to meet this race to the bottom against trucking. That is simply not sustainable.

I do not see why we have HRD projects to bring in truckers to compete against our own truckers. We do not have a shortage of truckers in this country. A lot of young people want to get into trucking and they should be paid the going rate.

[Railway continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I was fascinated to hear in my hon. colleague's speech earlier about the $56 million a year that the CEO gets and then, on top of that, that fact that the government is now giving him a blank cheque in order to impose his agreement on CN.

I guess the question in the simple street vernacular of the time could be: Who is your daddy? What a situation we have here. We have an industry that has been running itself into the ground beside the tracks because of its accident rate. We have had workers asking again and again for some standards on safety and we have a CEO making $56 million a year. The government, with support from the Liberals and their friends in the Bloc, are forcing closure on any of the issues around safety and allowing CN a blank cheque to write a new contract.

What does my colleague make of this?

[Railway continuation Act, 2007, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague's discussion about what is at stake here and our obligation as members of Parliament to get serious about the issue of safety with rail transport because we have seen a disturbing escalation across the country of railway accidents and a complete lack of a plan or accountability from the government, the Transportation Safety Board and the CN in terms of addressing the growing number of derailments, locomotive accidents, fires, spills and the threat that poses to Canadian citizens.

What I am interested in bringing home today in my question is the issue of the growing gap we are seeing right now. We see it everywhere in our country this prosperity gap where these unaccountable CEOs with their golden parachutes and all the special gifts they get and whatever money is given to them is considered completely reasonable, whereas honest working people are nickel-and-dimed time and time again by governments like that and its supporters in the Bloc Québécois who support any budget the government puts out. The CEO for CN is making $56 million a year. The gap between what he makes and basically what anyone else makes is $56 million a year.

In light of this incredible gap between these mandarins of industry who are being treated, feted and protected by people like the Conservative Party and its friends in the Liberal Party, and the gap with ordinary working people who are out trying to make an honest living and pay their taxes, how does the member feel that is playing into this CN role when a man who is making $56 million a year cannot even guarantee safe rail transport in this country?

[Railway Operations Legislation, April 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I have been following this strike situation very closely, being that my region is dependent upon rail. We haul all kinds of forestry products. We haul sulphuric acid from the smelters, out of the Horne smelter in Rouyn-Noranda and the Kidd Creek smelter in Timmins.

Last week we had a massive train derailment in our region. The Blanche River was contaminated when numerous cars containing sulphuric acid turned over. It was an Ontario Northland line, which is a provincial line. We have had other derailments of our acid trains, and it is of great concern in our region.

I looked at the issues of transportation safety. We have seen a massive increase in train derailments since 2002. The Transportation Safety Board has had very few indepth studies of these accidents and there have been very few prosecutions. Serious questions have been raised about how a company like CN can make the kind of money it does. Questions have been raised about whether there are adequate crews working on the line and whether adequate measures have been taken to ensure that these very long freight trains, which run across the country, have the adequate staffing to support them to ensure public safety.

Therefore, when we are talking about ordering the workers back to work, they have been the canaries in the coal mine, to use the overused expression. They have been the ones speaking out consistently about the lack of support by CN to ensure that we have safety on the ground with adequate ground crews.

What steps has his government taken? It has sat on the sidelines through this dispute?

We are talking about issues of public safety and about ensuring that the CN workers have the support. Are enough workers on the ground to ensure there is adequate safety in rail transportation in our country?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2007, April 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, last summer I had the honour of going to a number of communities in my riding to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Treaty No. 9. After about the third community I must confess that there was not much to celebrate in the fact that we have signed treaties and ripped them up the minute they were signed.

The federal government went into those communities and basically lied to the people and had no intention of living up to signed agreements. Unfortunately, we see that sad history with almost any signed agreement with first nations. So many of them have been ignored and ripped up.

In my community we have a signed agreement between the Government of Canada and the people of Kashechewan to move them off the squalid flood plain they are on and move them onto high ground, yet in the budget there is no money for first nations and nothing for education. We can buy tanks to send anywhere we want in the world, but we are going to leave Canadian citizens on a third world flood plain and there is no money, nothing for them.

I would like to ask the hon. member what he thinks about that, looking at the budget and the amount of money in the federal coffers but nothing being put forward for the most desperate people we have in our country?

[Petitions, March 28th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased today to bring forward a petition signed by people from across Canada concerning the issue of technical protection measures, known as TPMs.

TPMs are implemented by some copyright holders because they can violate end users' privacy rights; prevent consumers from enjoying content on devices and software of their independent choice; circumvent or compromise the security of computers, including rendering them vulnerable to attack--and we remember the well publicized fiasco of the Sony BMG rootkit; that TPMs can be applied to both content and devices; that the copyright holder and the owner of the device have rights that must be respected; that copyright holder's own rights on the protected work and private citizens usually own the devices that access these works; that TPMs can be abused to harm the interests of the copyright holder and/or the device owner; that numerous Canadian organizations have opposed the legal protection of TPMs supplied to copyright holders or manufacturers of devices, including, but not limited to, the Canada's Privacy Community, the Digital Security Coalition, the Canadian Music Creators Coalition, Appropriation Art Coalition, Canadian Federation of Students, Canadian Library Association, Canadian Art Museum Directors' Organization and several thousands of Canadian citizens already signed these on such a position; that we are looking for Canadian legislation, such as the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act which prohibits the condition of the supply of a product or service on a person waiving their rights; and that the section 77 of the Competition Act regulates against the exclusive dealing in tied selling.

Therefore, the petitioners are calling upon Parliament to prohibit the application of a technical protection measure to a device without the informed consent of the owner of the device and to prohibit the conditioning of the supply of content to the purchase or use of a device, which has a technical measure applied to it. Further, they call upon Parliament to recognize the rights of citizens to personally control their own communication devices and choose the software based on their own personal criteria.

[Points of Order, March 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the other day I had an exchange with the Indian affairs minister on whether the dike in Kashechewan was in danger of collapse and whether life was at risk. I was referring to a capital budget report, and I would like to quote from it to set the context, in which it referred to:

—a possibility of loss of life and decrease the potential for extensive property damages of the dike failure during a flood. There is a probability that the dike will collapse during a major flood...

I had asked the minister about this. He said that the community was satisfied with steps taken on the dike. I do not believe that is the case. However, I did use an intemperate, off-the-cuff remark. I used it three times. I fully admit it. I am very passionate about these issues. However, I do have immense respect for the House and the importance of discourse in the House.

Therefore, I wish to apologize to the House for my intemperate use of the street vernacular. I am sorry, Mr. Speaker.

[The Budget, March 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, as he is the minister for northern Ontario, I would like to talk about the complete failure we have seen right across northern Ontario in terms of rural municipal infrastructure. After years of underfunding, our communities have been left with debt payments on infrastructure that most tax rolls simply cannot meet.

He has heard me speak many times about the failing of commerce, the failing of other programs and the lack of infrastructure support from the federal government. However, I want to ask him a specific question because we have talked about this case many times. Larder Lake and Virginiatown have been waiting and looking for help, can those two communities expect help from his government, yes or no?