Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to participate in this debate. I will be splitting my time with the member for Cariboo—Prince George.
On a slightly different vein, I know this has been a tough week for many of us here. I want to express my personal condolences to the Hillyer and Ford families. I also express my best wishes to the member for Scarborough—Agincourt. I understand there are some health issue that have re-emerged. I really have enjoyed debating with him in the House thus far, and I look forward to him having a full recovery and continuing to contribute to this place.
Bill C-7 is about the RCMP. It is about collective bargaining in the context of the RCMP.
Before I get into some substantive arguments about the specific issue of secret ballots, which has been the focus of the back and forth by the folks in disagreement, I want to review some of the ground on our perspective of the bill.
The bill acknowledges and respects a recent Supreme Court decision, which says the RCMP is entitled to bargain collectively. For the most part, Bill C-7 is a fairly reasonable response to the court ruling and we support this legislation going to committee. That is the basic underlying groundwork here.
However, we feel very strongly that the legislation needs to protect the right of RCMP members to vote via a secret ballot for unionization. That is an important right and it is respected by Canadians in the vast majority of contexts. Working men and women in the RCMP and in other environments need to have their right to vote in a secret ballot.
Notably, as well, wage disputes will continue to be resolved through binding arbitration. There will be no striking of police officers, obviously, and that is an important point to clarify.
In the context of discussing the RCMP, I want to briefly salute the very good work done in my own constituency by the RCMP. In my riding of Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, and certainly in Alberta, we do not have provincial police forces, so we are served directly by the RCMP. We greatly appreciate the incredible work the RCMP does, not only in direct policing but also in very positive engagement with the community.
In some of the past work I have done with different not-for-profit organizations, it has been great to have the engagement of the RCMP. For example, I was involved with the Rotary Club of Sherwood Park. We would regularly have members of the RCMP come and update us on some of the issues and challenges in our community. We had a very positive working relationship that was facilitated by that connection.
Because of the immense respect we on this side of the House have, and I think all members have, for members of the RCMP, it is important that this legislation protect their right to make decisions about collective bargaining through a secret ballot. We are at less than 10 government bills so far. Two of them deal with union certification and neither of them protect a right to a secret ballot. In fact, one of them, which we have already debated in this place, explicitly eliminated the protection of the right to secret ballot. It is clear how the government sees the issue of the secret ballot.
I said before in the House, I would have thought this issue would have been resolved. We are again having this 19th century debate about why secret ballots are actually important, again, something I think many people would have thought was settled.
It is important to identify why a secret ballot is important and I want to set out what I see as four key motivating arguments for the secret ballot. First, they protect the right to privacy. Second, they ensure protection against reprisals. Third, they ensure protection against corruption. Fourth, they facilitate a necessary process of deliberation that allows voters to most effectively express what is in their own interests.
First is the issue of a right to privacy. A public ballot does not respect an individual's right to privacy. It requires individuals to write or declare publicly their political convictions. There was a time when this is how elections happened, when people had to declare publicly for who they were voting for, and there were all kinds of problems with that. One of them was that their basic right to have their privacy protected in terms of their deeply held political convictions was not respected. The reason we would see the importance of a right to privacy in this context is that a person's opinions are, in a meaningful way, his or her own property. My opinions are my opinions, not just in the sense that I hold them, but that they are mine to dispose of, to share or not to share as I would wish.
Laws and systems of administration or certification that do not allow individuals to keep their opinions to themselves or dispose of them as they wish are violations of their privacy. They are, in a sense, violations of their ownership of their own opinions.
This also has negative practical consequences as well. In addition to violating the basic privacy rights of members of the RCMP, in this case, not having a secret ballot, having a public ballot, always creates the risk of reprisal. This is very much the early history of the movement to the secret ballot.
Secret ballots were introduced in the 19th century in the U.K., for example, around the time of the Great Reform Act, and as the franchise was extended, as more people were being allowed to vote, there was a recognition, especially for those who were more economically disadvantaged and therefore dependent on the employ of those who were wealthier, that people were vulnerable to political pressure or reprisals in the context of a public ballot.
The history is that the secret ballot was very much brought in to protect the rights of people, of working men and women, to be able to express themselves politically without fear of reprisal.
It is perverse, ironic, and quite unfortunate that it is precisely in the environment of union certification, when we are talking again about the basic political rights of working men and women, that the government is clearly not respecting the importance of the secret ballot.
There is, of course, always the possibility that, in a public ballot, someone would face some kind of reprisal, a negative social or other response from colleagues, if they were not doing or voting the way that this other person wished them to.
The third argument in favour of the secret ballot is that it provides protection against corruption. Before there were secret ballots, there was the real risk of people being paid to vote in a certain way, and that is a possibility when we have a public ballot. It is obviously not a possibility when there is a secret ballot, as there is no way to effectively buy a vote because we do not know if the vote is then actually provided as paid for.
That was another argument that was important in the initial evolution of the secret ballot and to some extent remains important now, that there is no possibility of there being inducements when there is a secret ballot.
Finally, secret ballots ensure there is a process of deliberation that happens before a vote; so a vote date is set, there is an opportunity for both sides of an argument to present their opinions, for there to be a conversation, and then for a conclusion to arise. I think most people accept the importance of this process of deliberation. That is why we have an election campaign. That is why we have a period of debate before an election takes place.
The advantages of this for working men and women in the context of certification are very clear. Someone might come up to me and say, “Why not sign this card?” and present one side of the argument to me. I might say, “Sure, that sounds like a good idea”, but I might feel differently if I were presented with counter-arguments. Having that process of deliberation ensures that people have time to think through an act according to their interests.
I think these are some key reasons why a secret ballot is important in this context and in all contexts.
Here are the principal arguments we hear against the secret ballot, specifically in the context of certification. People on the other side say that a secret ballot remains an option here, but it is just not required. All these arguments about the importance of a secret ballot indicate why a secret ballot should be guaranteed. People should have the certainty of knowing that their privacy will be protected.
If we said that, in the next general election, there would be secret ballots in some ridings but not in others, I think we would say that was insufficient, that there should be a guarantee of respect for individuals' privacy when they cast their ballots.
Certainly the possibility of employer intimidation and an imbalance in the workplace is raised from time to time. Certainly, though, there is no serious possibility of intimidation against individual voters who keep their perspectives quiet and vote in a secret ballot.
There is always the risk of intimidation against organizers of a certification drive, and I would acknowledge that; but of course the possibility of intimidation in that case exists regardless of whether or not there is a secret ballot, because for somebody who is organizing, whether it is in the context of a card check or in the context of a secret ballot, there is still the possibility of intimidation there.
Further, we are dealing with the government. The likelihood of the government exerting employer-type intimidation is very unlikely.
For these reasons, we see the value of the bill, and we support it going to the committee. However, we hope the government will also see the value of the secret ballot.
