Madam Speaker, I would like to begin my remarks by doing something that perhaps we should have done a great deal earlier, and that is to recognize and to pay tribute to one of the most well-respected, well-known, brave and dignified labour leaders that this country has ever seen, and I make reference to Jean-Claude Parrot, the former leader of CUPW, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.
He led a couple of strikes in the mid-1970s against a draconian situation in probably the most hostile industrial relations environment in recent history. He wound up going to prison for his convictions and his beliefs. I met with JC just a few years ago in Geneva, where he was representing Canada at the ILO.
I raise this because our conversation led to growing trends in his home country, my current country. The name of Thomas d'Aquino came up because we were talking about the driving influences, the dynamics, facing the labour movement and the economy generally today, and that seemed to be the wish list of Thomas d'Aquino, the declaration of Thomas d'Aquino on what Canada needs to do.
He was the unofficial prime minister of Canada. He was guiding things during the 1990s. He had 10 or 12 things that he said Canada must do in order to prosper in the 21st century, et cetera. One by one, he was ticking them off, and right up in the top three was that corporations had to get out from under their legacy costs.
“Legacy costs” is code for pensions. Legacy costs are blamed all the time, even when the auto industry got into trouble recently. They never let a good crisis go to waste. The first thing the industry said was that it was not industry mismanagement and not the fact that the industry builds cars that nobody wants to buy, but the legacy costs. If only the industry could get out from under their legacy costs, said the auto industry, it would be as good as Honda and Toyota.
Jean-Claude Parrot, in his wisdom, flagged this for me as we sat having dinner in Geneva. I have been watching his prescient observations come true, because we have seen an unprecedented assault on the very notion that workers should have an expectation of a reasonable pension plan when they retire. It has been systematically undermined and chipped away at.
Here is the modus operandi. First, we get Thomas d'Aquino, or John Manley now, to say something. He will say that we need to get rid of pensions. Suddenly, a couple of right-wing think tanks come along and validate that. Sure enough, a couple of studies by the Fraser Institute say that we have to get rid of pensions. Then, sure enough, the lobbyists are unleashed; let loose the hounds. The lobbyists descend on Parliament Hill. Suddenly, Tim Powers and Geoff Norquay are on Parliament Hill saying that we have to get rid of pensions.
All of a sudden, a neo-conservative government dutifully falls into line and says that we have to get rid of pensions, although perhaps in a nicer, kinder tone, because villainy wears many masks, as we know, but none so treacherous as the mask of virtue, and the government is good at putting on the mask of virtue when necessary.
We will even see the government use that trick tonight as it tries to misrepresent what is really going on in the lockout at Canada Post. Because this is not really about 0.5 of 1% of a wage increase for one of the three years; that in and of itself would probably not be enough to cause an impasse in a national institution. What this is really about is the systematic erosion of a public service pension plan and the benefits and the expectations of that group of workers. They chose to take on Canada Post because, frankly, it has been an irritant for years. It has been a very militant union, and as I said, it is one of the most volatile industrial relations environments in the western world. It has been a sick, sick environment, and I am the first to recognize this.
There was a fragile balance. After the extremely hostile days of the seventies, a relative labour peace, a compact, as it were, was managed, and that survived until about the time the Liberals started demanding that Canada Post pay the government dividends. All of a sudden, the mandate of Canada Post was expanded to not just delivering mail on time and providing good service and reasonable postal rates, but to paying millions of dollars per year into the general revenue.
That is when the government started milking it like a cash cow. That is when the pension started to get starved, et cetera. This has been a problem throughout, but Canada Post did manage to get relative labour peace for a number of years, until Moya Greene was parachuted in. Moya Greene tried to change the corporate culture at Canada Post, but then most recently the government went head hunting.
This is one of the problems with not having a public appointments commission. They went head hunting for a corporate hitman who would come in and do the really dirty work, who would really throw a spanner into the gears of industrial relations, who would stir things up to the point where we would have this impasse and the difficulty we see today.
It is the same as in the movie Wag the Dog. One manufactures a crisis and then points to the crisis and says that the only thing to do is to use the extreme measure of privatization. It is not paranoid to assume that is the ultimate goal here. I have watched the reaction every time we raise it. All those people on the Conservative benches nod their heads saying, “Well, what is wrong with that? It's a given, isn't it? We are going to privatize it sooner or later. We might as well start now”.
Frankly, most of the country does not agree with privatizing Canada Post.
They parachuted in this hitman, Deepak Chopra, not the guru with the incense and all that stuff, but the other one, the corporate hitman. They parachuted him in at $650,000 a year plus a 33% bonus for everything he can squeeze out of the workers in this round of bargaining. That is pretty good change for the CEO of this company.
We had an expression in the labour movement when I was negotiating agreements that we do not want tourists at the bargaining table. We do not want tourists, but we surely do not want an agent provocateur. We surely do not want a saboteur at the bargaining table who is going to deliberately undermine things, deliberately provoke a conflict and then have the government of the day run to the rescue to put the fire out. They threw a bucket of kerosene on the smouldering embers of an old historic labour dispute and then came rushing in with the fire brigade saying, “Put out the fire with back-to-work legislation. It is a lockout, more hose, more pressure. We need more steam”. It is crazy.
I represent the riding of Winnipeg Centre. In 1921 the Government of Canada wanted to lock up J. S. Woodsworth as a leader of the 1919 Winnipeg general strike, but the good people of my riding sent him to Ottawa instead to be their member of Parliament. He stayed there for 21 years and became the founder and first leader of our old party, the CCF, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. I am very proud of that history and that tradition, and we are not going to stop that tradition today no matter what we call our party, because we smell a rat in the woodpile.
This is not a normal labour dispute. There is something sinister going on here, and it is not paranoid to assume that. I keep seeing nodding heads on that side every time we imply that what the Conservatives are really trying to do is find justification to privatize this crown corporation either by starving it to death or using it as a cash cow.
It is really hard to understand why there would be an impasse for a cost of living wage increase when the company showed $281 million in profits last year and similar amounts in previous years. This is a stable work environment. The company has shed a lot of labour costs by technological change so its operating costs are actually going down even though its capital costs went up to put in new mail sorting services et cetera.
It does a good job. It is a Canadian institution that we value and treasure. We are not going to let those institutions by which we define ourselves as Canadians be dismantled one by one.
The labour compact in the postwar years led to relative labour peace and an end to wildcat strikes. The deal was when productivity was up and profits were up, workers' wages would go up. That was the deal, and that deal has been eroded and compromised.
