Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the debate on Bill C-4 today.
On November 7, I was at a book launch of the Right Hon. Joe Clark, the book entitled How We Lead: Canada in a Century of Change. Incidentally, I recommend reading it. That evening I met Larry Rousseau who is the Regional Executive Vice President of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
We exchanged comments about this bill. I mentioned that Bill C-4 was explosive. It was a play on words and I am happy to see that he agreed and he picked that expression up because he used it in a text that he had published in The Huffington Post on November 23, but he also used it in a number of meetings the following week.
He told me on the Wednesday following, November 13, that he and the Public Service Alliance of Canada would be organizing a series of meetings to brief public servants in this town about the impact of Bill C-4 and that they would invite all the MPs from the area on this side of the river and the Outaouais to attend these meetings.
I attended the four meetings that were held on that Wednesday, where hundreds of public servants came to express their real concerns with the bill, which is now before us, and the contents of this omnibus legislation, specifically in terms of its far-reaching changes to the legislation that governs the federal public service and also workers that fall under federal jurisdiction through the Canada Labour Code.
The bill essentially does blow up a number of public service rights that have been acquired over the past half century, starting in the sixties when the prime minister at the time, Mr. Pearson, granted the federal public servants the lawful right to strike within “un cadre législatif très utile”. They are almost going to lose that.
In a very summary manner, I will say what Bill C-4 would do to this.
First, it would give the government the ability to define essential services in a way that was not done before. Before that, there was a mechanism where both parties, the employer and the employees, could present their arguments and the body that rendered the decision was respected. However, now this law essentially gives that authority entirely to the government.
Unions will no longer have the right to arbitration, yet it is a very important tool that has often been used to settle disputes. Now arbitration will not be an option unless 80% of the members do a job that is considered essential.
Once again, the government is giving itself the right to very easily control a union's ability to use arbitration. It is taking away the essential right to a negotiation tool that works well when the parties cannot come to an agreement.
Even if unions manage to win the right to arbitration, the government has also changed the conditions that arbitrators can use. They can only refer to the government's financial situation or recruitment and retention issues in the public service.
Everything else that could be considered before will now be taken away, including the responsibility of arbitrators to evaluate—as part of a broader, Canadian context—the situation of public servants involved in the negotiations before them. That, too, will be eliminated.
These arbitration boards will no longer be independent. Basically, they will have to report to the government. In addition, the definition of danger is changing, which will affect 200,000 public servants and 800,000 other employees in Canada.
The minister or one of his delegates will be responsible for defining danger. Those are the major changes that have been made, but there are others as well. They will set us back 50 years. Gone is the tremendous progress made regarding the rights of unionized workers in Canada's public service and the workers governed by the Canada Labour Code.
Next June, the five largest federal public service unions will see their agreement expire. What I believe is happening is that the government is outrageously and outlandishly tilting the playing field in its favour so that it can come to these negotiations and essentially adopt a take it or leave it attitude.
We have seen the government do that before. It was with the provinces on the health accord. I was party to that accord in 2004. We negotiated and signed a health accord for 10 years. As we heard today during question period, it is coming to term next year. The Government of Canada, through the Minister of Finance, has basically said that this is it; take it or leave it. It is not a healthy position in terms of relationships.
In terms of the federal government, we need a healthy relationship with our employees, and it would be very seriously affected by the provisions in Bill C-4. What are some of the consequences? We are looking at further erosion, certainly, of the rights and the morale of our public servants. We are also looking at affecting the delivery of services to the Canadian public. There is also a longer-term impact, which concerns a topic we have been bringing to the fore on a regular basis.
The initiatives in this bill will weaken unions. That is contrary to the common good and not in the public interest.
Let us not forget that, from 1950 to the 1980s, there was a phenomenon known as the Great Compression. During those years, the income gap shrank thanks in large part to unions. In 1951, 28.4% of Canadian workers were unionized. That rose to 40% in the 1980s, reaching 41.8% in 1984.
Since then, numbers have fallen and now stand at around 30%. Coincidentally, the wage and income gap within the Canadian population has grown.
We know that the middle class is now earning 5% less, while income levels of the super rich have risen astronomically.
I am sure my colleagues will love the title of this 2009 book by Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal. Paul Krugman is an economist and Nobel Prize winner, so we have to be careful how we attack him here. I will quote a passage in that book:
...everything we know about unions says that their new power [after World War II] was a major factor in the creation of a middle-class society... First, unions raise average wages for their membership; they also, indirectly and to a lesser extent, raise wages for similar workers, even if they aren't represented by unions, as nonunionized employers try to diminish the appeal of union drives to their workers. As a result unions tend to reduce the gap in earnings between blue-collar workers and higher-paid occupations, such as managers. Second, unions tend to narrow income gaps among blue-collar workers by negotiating bigger wage increases for their worst-paid members than for their best-paid members. And nonunion employers, seeking to forestall union organizers, tend to echo this effect. In other words, the known effects of unions on wages are exactly what we see in the Great Compression: a rise in the wages of blue-collar workers compared with managers and professionals, and a narrowing of wage differentials among blue-collar workers themselves.
