Pat Martin

[Ethics, May 27th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is a little rich to hear Marjory LeBreton, an artifact of the golden era of Gucci shoes mandarins--

[Democratic Reform, May 23rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are witnessing the death rattle of an archaic, outdated and expensive anachronism. With false residency claims, double-dipping expenses and political stumping at the taxpayers' expense, the Senate has gone from an expensive nuisance to a national disgrace. It is more in sadness than in anger as Canadians watch this abuse and the ethical lapses unfurl. We were promised that things would be different, but instead the legacy of the administration will be $16 glasses of orange juice and an almost comical cliché of hog-troughing senators.

Grassroots Conservatives must be horrified that this administration has more in common with Grant Devine than with Preston Manning. Conservatives squandered their chance to do anything meaningful with their minority government. When we ask ourselves what they have accomplished with their majority government, they abolished the gun registry and the Canadian Wheat Board. Whoop-de-do-dah-day. Pretty thin gruel for a strong, stable majority Conservative government. What a pathetic waste of an opportunity to build a better Canada.

The Senate of Canada should be abolished. That is plain and simple.

[Ethics, May 22nd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the minister is going for cocky when he should be going for contrition. A little less swagger and a little more Jimmy Swaggart would be in order.

They rode into Ottawa on their high horse of accountability, and all we have to show for it is the mess that horse left. They should take their Federal Accountability Act and run it through that horse and throw it on their roses for all the good it has ever done us.

My question for the minister is simple: when did it all go so terribly wrong? When did they jettison integrity and honesty and accountability for the sake of political expediency?

[Ethics, May 21st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it was in 2005 that the Prime Minister puffed up his chest and said “If anybody violates the public trust under my watch, they are going to prison”. Now his tune has changed. “All governments make mistakes” is what he says today.

Was it a mistake to continue to hand out plum patronage appointments to their pork-barrelling friends? Was it just a mistake to run a bunch of self-serving ads for programs that do not even exist? Was it a mistake to have the Prime Minister's Office cut a $90,000 cheque to buy the silence of a Conservative senator?

The public trust has been violated. It has been abused. In fact, Conservatives have stomped all over it. What happened to the promise they made in 2005? Who is going to jail?

[Economic Action Plan 2013 Act, No. 1, May 3rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Nanaimo—Cowichan for that very relevant question. I appreciate the work she has done on the file as our representative on the aboriginal affairs file.

The unemployment rate among aboriginal youth in my province and in many places across the country can be as high as 50% or 60%, four or five times higher than the already high unemployment rate for youth. There are communities in northern Manitoba where the unemployment rate is 85% to 90%. There is a vast pool of youth between 16 and 25 who, with an opportunity, could make a meaningful entrance into the workforce.

When I was head of the carpenters union, we did make an outreach effort specifically to go up and do some training in northern Manitoba because we had hydro dams going there. Believe me, a lot of the apprentices we signed in the aboriginal apprenticeship initiative found really satisfying careers in the construction industry. It is not a bad segue into the industrialized workforce, the construction and building trades.

It is hard work, and they are no strangers to hard work, growing up in the north. It is the high school kids from downtown Winnipeg who have a tough time getting into the construction industry, because it is hard work. These guys think it is easy money. For those who spent their life splitting wood and hauling fish nets in the wintertime, construction is easy money.

We are missing the boat by not matching the skills shortages that everybody knows about in the construction industry and the human resources surplus that is under our nose. Surely it is cheaper to train a kid from Pukatawagan than it is to fly them in from Lebanon or Southeast Asia or wherever these other temporary foreign workers are coming from. For God's sake, it is completely counterintuitive.

[Economic Action Plan 2013 Act, No. 1, May 3rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, another question comes to mind.

First of all it was robocalls and the fixed election. If the Conservatives won their razor-thin majority by cheating, they do not actually have a mandate to govern at all, never mind what they are doing now by abusing and undermining every institution of democracy that we hold dear.

Then it was election financing fraud. Now it is using MPs' mailing privileges to carpet bomb ridings like mine. Ten members of Parliament from Manitoba used their MP mailing privileges to carpet bomb my riding with all this stuff.

The question that comes to mind and the question I put to you, Mr. Speaker, is this: where did they get the lists? How did they know that my neighbour's mother only lived at my neighbour's house for four months before she passed away? How did they send a personally addressed letter to that person's mother?

How about the case in which they filed their income tax from their son's address? How did they know that their income tax was mailed from that address?

[Economic Action Plan 2013 Act, No. 1, May 3rd, 2013]

They are one step up from Simon Legree. They are slave drivers. They are human traffickers.

[Economic Action Plan 2013 Act, No. 1, May 3rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to follow on the heels of the speech just made by the Minister of Labour, because it gives me the opportunity to point out to anyone listening, to the country in general, that this particular piece of legislation and the recent actions of that Minister of Labour constitute nothing less than a war on labour and the left. It is a war on fair wages and benefits, earned over a century of free collective bargaining and trade union rights. The minister has been systematically undermining the rights of workers to organize, the rights of workers to bargain collectively and the rights of workers sometimes to withhold their services, in fact, as is their right should collective bargaining reach an impasse.

We find it again in the most egregious assault on trade union rights in the post-war era. We find it again in the parameters of this document in which the Conservatives are interfering pre-emptively in the collective bargaining rights of crown corporations. They say that they will dictate the terms and conditions of those working people.

I do not think I need to remind you, Mr. Speaker, that a burgeoning, well-paid middle class is the greatest strength our economy has, and it can be traced directly to the advent and rise of the trade union movement, which bargained for fair wages and working conditions for working people all over North America. It was the United States of America's biggest folly and biggest mistake when it attacked trade unions in that country with its right-to-work legislation, with measures just like we are seeing from their neo-conservative counterparts in Canada. They diminished the rate of unionization in those right-to-work states, and correspondingly, wages and working conditions cascaded and tumbled to where a good job in Georgia or North Carolina these days pays $8, $10 or $12 an hour, with no benefits whatsoever.

If that is the direction the Conservatives want to go, I ask in whose interest it is to drive down the wages and working conditions of Canadians. Canadians do not need to elect a government to do that. There are market forces all over the place that seek to do that.

The Conservatives are interfering with the normal market forces, the natural market forces, that dictate that in a time of skills shortages, working people can command a better wage. That is the time they go to the bargaining table and say that our labour might have been worth only $20 an hour last year, when there was no work, but there is lots of work now. Now is the time when working people should be able to negotiate fair wages.

What are the Conservatives doing in my industry? One example found in Bill C-60 is the temporary foreign worker program. People forget that in the last omnibus budget bill, that minister eliminated the Fair Wages and Hours of Labour Act. They hardly even noticed that. The construction fair wages act set minimum wages for non-union construction workers at something higher than the provincial minimum wage. She said that they got rid of that because hardly anyone works under it anyway.

Correspondingly, the Conservatives brought in the temporary foreign worker expedited 10-day guarantee. Labour brokers, labour pimps, from around the world are now bringing crews of construction workers to Canada under that program. They are being paid 15% less, and not less than the construction wage but less than the minimum wage in a province. How does any fair employer ever compete? How does any fair contractor ever win another job if its competition is using these labour pimps that have been facilitated by the minister to undermine the whole fair tendering process?

These are the unintended consequences, or maybe intended consequences, of the rash, irresponsible legislation we are seeing in these massive omnibus bills. There is no debate. There is never any time to debate any of these predictable consequences. We would have brought these things to the attention of the minister if these things ever could be debated fairly.

I was thinking earlier today of a poem by Allen Ginsberg called Howl. It begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation [rot]”. I watched the best aspects of our parliamentary democracy systematically undermined, assaulted and destroyed by the government. The Conservatives have this idea, like a lot of neo-conservative fundamentalists, that the end justifies the means, that they can throw away everything that is good and decent about our parliamentary democracy, because somehow God is on their side and they are going to drive this down people's throat, in spite of overwhelming evidence that it is the wrong way to go.

I saw a bumper sticker the last time I was in Washington that said, “At least the war on the middle class is going well”. That is what is happening here.

The Conservatives have this idea that they have to ratchet down the expectations of Canadian workers by ordering people back to work at Canada Post at a rate lower than what was negotiated with their employer, or by pre-empting job action at Air Canada by ordering people back to work before there was even a strike, or now, by stripping the collective bargaining ability from the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people who work in crown corporations.

In whose interest is it to drive down the wages of Canadian workers? Are they out of their minds? We can look south of the border at the predictable consequences. They have destroyed their middle class there. They have completely undermined fair wages.

I come from the building industry. I served an apprenticeship as a carpenter. I have indentured literally hundreds of apprentices in my experience as the head of the carpenters' union. We predicted skills shortages 40 or 50 years ago, for heaven's sake, given the predictable demographics of the baby boom. It was no surprise.

A temporary foreign worker program that saturates the market with cheap foreign labour is not a human resources strategy. It is the polar opposite. It is admitting defeat.

Let me give an example of some of the catastrophes in that program. I already brought it to the minister's attention years ago. Gold River Tahsis, on Vancouver Island, had a pulp and paper mill shut down. It was a terrible loss to the community. A company in China bought the pulp and paper mill, but it had to be dismantled and torn down. Eighty unemployed millwrights in the town of Gold River Tahsis could have used one more year's work to dismantle the pulp and paper mill. Instead, the company had to go to a labour broker, a labour pimp we call them, and bring in 80 people from South Asia to do it. We got the documents. We got a copy of the application. It asked if they had tried to find qualified Canadians. The response was “yes”. It asked why they did not hire qualified Canadians. The response was that the cost was too high.

That is what the contractor put in the documents that went to the minister's desk, and the Conservatives signed off and brought in these guys. All these local people in Gold River Tahsis were locked outside the gate looking in while a bunch of temporary foreign workers got the last few weeks of employment in their dying pulp mill. That is an atrocity.

The Winnipeg International Airport is another example. Again, I tried to go to the minister with this complaint. We have a couple of hundred unemployed carpenters in Manitoba. We are building a brand new airport that we are all proud of. Where does the construction crew come from to place all that concrete? They come from Lebanon. Their last job was in Latvia. They are a bunch of Lebanese workers being shopped around by these labour pimps who go around the world with their crews undermining the local conditions. There are hundreds of unemployed carpenters in Manitoba. It is skilled work doing elevated concrete ramps with all kinds of staging and scaffolding involved, and it goes to a bunch of Lebanese workers.

I have nothing against the good people of Lebanon, but they have no right to those Canadian jobs. If we need to open the doors to immigration, there would be no complaint from this side of the House, but those jobs should not be given away to temporary foreign workers.

God knows under what terms and conditions they were being paid. Believe me, the local contractors can never compete with someone who can get 40 people working at 15% less than the minimum wage. How does a fair contractor ever win another job?

The most recent example is the Women's Hospital in Winnipeg. That is going on right now. The labourers and carpenters are picketing that job as we speak, because temporary foreign workers are doing labour work. These are not even carpenters' jobs. They are construction labourers. The Conservatives cannot tell me that there is not some unemployed aboriginal kid in a northern Manitoba reserve, where the unemployment rate is 80% and 90%, who could not be trained and put on that job at $20 an hour to do construction labour.

No one has tried hard enough to place the skills shortages with the labour surpluses. It is a pathetic situation, absolutely pathetic.

Bill C-60 is full of 50-some odd pieces of legislation that we as members of Parliament, representing the people who elected us, will never have a chance to give proper scrutiny and oversight to. We are being denied that right by closure again. How many times have the Conservatives moved closure on a bill? All of them. It is an easy number. I do not need to even know the number.

Every single time they have a piece of legislation, they deny us the right to do due diligence, as is our obligation and duty as elected members of Parliament.

I am sick of it. I have watched it deteriorate, and in my 15 years as a member of Parliament, I have never seen it as bad as it is today. These guys are a disgrace.

[Petitions, May 3rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to present a petition signed by literally tens of thousands of Canadians who call upon Parliament to take note that asbestos is the greatest industrial killer that the world has ever known and that more Canadians now die from asbestos than all other industrial or occupational causes combined.

The petitioners call upon Parliament to ban asbestos in all of its forms and to stop blocking international health and safety conventions designed to protect workers from asbestos, such as the Rotterdam Convention.

[Government Expenditures, May 3rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives are deluded if they think that the Auditor General was somehow congratulating them for doing a good job. The Auditor General lambasted them in the strongest language I have ever seen in an Auditor General's report.

If this $3.1-billion boondoggle was their only problem, it would be different, but we have a pattern developing here of ministers resigning, lives at risk in search and rescue mismanagement and unreported privacy violations of a million Canadians. It makes one wonder what this government is good at.

There is one thing it is good at: re-branding Government of Canada websites in Conservative Party colours to make it look like somehow there is no differences between the Conservative Party and the--