Mr. Speaker, just before we were interrupted by the quorum call, I was making the point that we should look at Bill C-25 in full light of the fact that the 1990s was a terrible decade for our public service employees.
There were seven or eight years of wage freezes with zero per cent increases. There was total devastation with program review where one-third of civil servants were laid off. Many were demoralized by job cutbacks because even though the civil service was reduced by one-third, the amount of work did not change. Employees were struggling with how to give service to the public with fewer resources and fewer people to do the job.
The ultimate insult was when the former President of the Treasury Board took the entire $30 billion surplus out of the employee pension plan without so much as a by your leave, with no negotiations, without even considering the fact that a surplus in a pension plan is the property of the employees. A pension plan should be viewed as wages being held in trust until such time as they are needed. When that pension plan went into surplus, the entire surplus of $30 billion was taken out of the employees' pension plan.
We can understand how morale reached a new all time low during the 1990s. It is in that context there is some reservation and hesitation on the part of public service employees as they look at this new proposal. Frankly, the level of trust suffered during that decade.
I have pointed out before that anybody who has been in the public service for a long time has lived through virtually every type of scientific management gizmo. Every type of California pop psychology one can imagine has been foisted on public service employees, from total quality management and William Deming, to quality work circles, to team concept and PS 2000. All of these ideas were supposed to do something about the terrible morale problem and the subsequent lack of attachment I suppose that many employees felt to their jobs.
The Fryer study identified many issues that would actually improve and lead to improved job satisfaction and ergo, improved productivity and a sense of well-being within the workplace. I am pleased to see that Bill C-25 incorporates some of the recommendations of the Fryer report.
I can serve notice to the minister that during the committee hearings we will be recommending further amendments that would further implement other issues raised by the study that have not found their way into the legislation. It is another reason we were optimistic that we could move the bill out of the House of Commons into committee where this meaningful work would begin.
Human resources and labour relations are always difficult issues. They are very complex. They are multifaceted in a sense. They are even more complex in the public sector because labour relations deal with the imbalance in the historical relationship between employers and employees. That imbalance is accentuated when the employer is also the legislator. I say that only to preface my remarks that the government, and previous governments, Tory governments as well, have exercised their legislative power over their employees far too readily and far too often. It has become the norm.
A specific example is back to work legislation. It has become the norm in the labour relations regime in the public sector that as soon as people exercise their right to strike or their right to withhold services, they can almost guarantee that the government is already printing back to work legislation to bring to the House of Commons.
In the few years I have been here as a member of Parliament I believe there have been five separate occasions when the government has ordered public service employees back to work, whether it was in the post office or in the public sector at large.
My argument and the reason I raise this, and I am serving notice that we will be raising this at the committee level as well, is that free collective bargaining does not work if we are holding back the power for employees to use the only tool they have to apply pressure to the employer, which is the right to withhold their services. When we deny employees that right, we are bastardizing the whole concept of free collective bargaining.
In 1966, when the public service employees won the right to free collective bargaining, it was an error, an omission, that a labour relations regime was not factored in, that a clear, concise and concrete labour management regime was not introduced as well. Instead, labour relations have been dealt with in an ad hoc, hodgepodge fashion. The one thing I welcome in the bill is that it does contemplate clarifying the relationship between employees and employers and, if I can take the minister at her word, reintroducing an element of fairness to the system by using a bipartite approach. Labour and management can sit down at the table as equal partners in a new national council concept and deal with the real issues of, from our point of view, job satisfaction, and, from their point of view, productivity and yardsticks to measure progress. That in itself is a move forward.
I have mentioned this before and I will again. It may be that because the minister's experience is from the Province of Quebec that she is open to this type of more progressive labour-management relationship, whereas those of us in western Canada have to still suffer through a situation where unions are always fighting for recognition. Not truly welcome at the table, they have to elbow their way to the table. Even then they are allowed at the table in a very reluctant way. It is an adversarial situation before the conversation even begins.
The European model is one of a more tripartite approach, where unions are recognized as a key element of civil society. I believe that if this attitude, this mentality, were transferred or moved into the federal public service, it might lead to real progress in the relationship that we see with the federal government and its employees.
I will not go into detail on the bill at this time because I still have some hope that we may get co-operation from all the parties in the House, that with one more speaker taking us to the end of the day we can conclude debate on the bill and get it to committee so we can hear from the 16 bargaining units affected by the bill. That will be the opportunity for us to make meaningful amendments to the bill and hopefully see it through to its logical conclusion.
