Pat Martin

[Resumption and Continuation of Postal Services Legislation, June 23rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I could relate with and agree to much of what my colleague had to say. The hon. member said things that I believe we know to be true. It is a fundamental tenet of a western democracy that working people have the right to organize in trade unions, they have the right to bargain collectively and they have the right to withhold their service if those negotiations and collective bargaining should reach an impasse.

We enshrined those rights in our Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a way to ameliorate and mitigate the imbalance that exists in the power dynamic between an employer and its employees. Obviously the power is resident with the employer and its has the ultimate economic hammer. Some countervailing rights are allocated to the employees so as to be able to move forward in the bargaining process.

Has the member ever seen the movie Wag The Dog, when one creates a manufactured crisis by underfunding the pension plan and then going balls to the walls in the negotiations trying to convince the world that the pension plan is so underfunded that it is an expectation that is unreasonable? Is he aware that he is willing dupe perhaps in this ridiculous charade?

[Resumption and Continuation of Postal Services Legislation, June 23rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, a fellow Winnipegger, for his address. I wonder if he is aware, though, that the $3.2 billion shortfall in the pension can be traced back to its origins in the fact that it was an underfunded pension plan, and that for the last decade or more Canada Post has been generating a profit and submitting that profit to general revenue.

Does my colleague know that the mandate of Canada Post is simply to deliver mail to the greatest number of Canadians at the lowest possible cost? Nowhere does the mandate of Canada Post include giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year in dividends to the federal government.

Had Canada Post been funding its pension adequately with that money, instead of putting it into general revenue, we would not have an underfunded pension.

[Resumption and Continuation of Postal Services Legislation, June 23rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I was the labour critic during the 1997 Canada Post lockout.

The member for Cardigan was then the minister of labour. I believe it was a guy who became the ambassador to Denmark, or was it Hans Island that we sent him to, Minister Gagliano, who was the minister for Canada Post. That was when the Liberals imposed an almost equally draconian back-to-work legislation package on the workers of Canada Post.

The fact is, these impasses often come down to the ability to pay. In the private sector there is often a legitimate inability to pay the workers' demands. In this case, Canada Post has been showing a surplus of $200 million to $300 million a year for the last 10 to 15 years. There was no inability to pay. There was no reason it could not tolerate the rotating strikes, which in fact left the mail still being delivered. There was no reason to lock them out.

If we took the total accumulated surplus over the last 15 years, there would have been $2 billion to $3 billion, more than ample room to provide a fair cost of living increase while leaving their pensions alone. In other words, do not start an assault on pensions based on the inability to pay if the numbers do not bear it out.

[Resumption and Continuation of Postal Services Legislation, June 23rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, fair wages benefit the whole community. I do not know if anyone could argue with that.

There are low-wage, low-cost economies, like the United States and even like some provinces. They advertise themselves as this, thinking it will attract investment if they say they are a low-wage, low-cost economy. Frankly, the product of that leaves a lot of social consequences.

Then there are places like New Zealand and Australia where a coffee server in a coffee shop makes $22 an hour. People working at London Drugs or whatever their equivalent is make $25 an hour. I have been to Denmark, Sweden and Norway, where, again, a coffee shop worker makes $20 to $25 an hour.

Here, for some reason we have convinced ourselves that it is a good thing to have low wages. How can that possibly be a good thing? In the richest and most powerful civilization in the history of the world, how is it a good idea to pay people a wage they cannot live on?

The rate of child poverty in Norway, Denmark and Sweden is zero. There are no poor children there because they believe in fair wages for people.

What is wrong with this country?

[Resumption and Continuation of Postal Services Legislation, June 23rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Timmins—James Bay for reminding this House and explaining to it some of the history and tradition involved in free collective bargaining and the struggle working people went through to enjoy what we now consider fundamental rights and freedoms, the right to free collective bargaining and, when that bargaining reaches an impasse, the right of working people to withhold their services as a legitimate economic lever to apply pressure to a bargaining relationship that is imbalanced at the outset from the obvious advantage that management has.

I want to begin, though, by clearing up some misinformation that the Minister of Labour has been sharing with this House. She keeps coming back to the point that she believes that what the government has imposed here by its legislation is somehow final offer selection, or FOS. I happen to know something about final offer selection, because it was in fact law in the Province of Manitoba for a period of time, and as a former trade union leader, I have negotiated dozens of collective agreements. In some of those collective agreements, the parties I was representing chose to settle their bargaining negotiations through final offer selection.

This has nothing to do with FOS, which is only effective when both parties voluntarily submit themselves to it as a form of arbitration to settle their differences. The fact of the matter is that both parties present their last best offer and then an arbitrator chooses one or the other. This does not resemble FOS whatsoever, which had its origins in major league baseball to settle wage disputes between teams and players. Once the two parties have stripped away all the other language issues and are down to just money and cannot agree on the money, they put their best offer forward and an arbitrator chooses one or the other, but not a combination of the two.

Therefore, the minister is misleading the House if she is trying to sell this package as a form of final offer selection.

The second thing I would like to raise is that if we scratch the surface of this impasse, its root cause is Canada Post's saying that it is unwilling or unable to maintain fair wages or to meet the wage demands of its employees. However, in actual fact, for the last 10 years or more, Canada Post has been paying a dividend to the Government of Canada to the degree of $200 million to $300 million per year in profits.

If one reads the mandate of Canada Post, and I used to be the critic and know it quite well, nowhere in its mandate is Canada Post supposed to be a cash cow for the government of the day. Its mandate is to provide the best possible mail service to the most people at the lowest possible cost. If there ever is a surplus, it should perhaps go to expanding Canada Post's delivery service to Canadians, or lowering the cost of stamps or buying new vehicles or sorting stations, but not to putting $200 million a year into the general revenues of the federal government.

If we add up the 10, 12 or 15 years that it has been putting $200 million to $280 million a year into general revenue, we would have $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion a year worth of accumulated surplus. With that, Canada Post would have no problem meeting the reasonable wage demands of a reasonable settlement. I am not going to judge what is reasonable or what is not. However, it could not claim poverty or inability to pay, if it were actually following its mandate instead of handing over all this money.

We can scratch the surface of this assault on pensions and get back to its root cause. I think the root cause is the unofficial prime minister of Canada, Thomas d'Aquino, and I do not hesitate saying that, and his new incarnation, John Manley. I say this because 12 years ago, Thomas d'Aquino stood and listed 10 or 15 things that he thought Canada had to do to move forward. What he really meant was what we had to do to re-create our country in the image of the United States, but in his mind it was to move forward. One of those was legacy costs. He flagged those as an unsustainable expectation of Canadian workers for the pensions that had became the norm in the post-war years.

Then the modus operandi kicked in. First, a bunch of right-wing think tanks validated that notion. Then a bunch of lobbyists started chatting up this notion on talk shows and wrote articles in newspapers. Then those lobbyists were dispatched to Parliament Hill and a neo-conservative government dutifully fell into line and did exactly what it had been told to do a decade before by the Business Council on National Issues, or now the CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, John Manley. That is where this comes from. They are hell-bent and determined to re-create Canada in the image of the United States.

Let me point out the folly of that in the context of union rights and fair wages. The greatest strength of the United States and what made it the economic powerhouse that it was until recently was its burgeoning middle class, a middle class that could consume. The United States got that because of free collective bargaining and the rise of the trade union movement from World War I through to the World War II and post-war eras, when unions negotiated fair wages. People want to dump on guys like Jimmy Hoffa, but the one thing that people should remember him for is that he took the lowest-paid occupation in the country and within a decade had turned it into one of the highest-paid blue collar jobs in the country.

Fair wages benefit the whole community. How can people not get that through their heads? When working people have a dollar in their pocket they spend it and they spend it again. In fact, a dollar is usually spent four times before it reaches its natural state of repose in some rich man's pocket. However, in the process on the way to the rich guy's pocket, it benefits a lot of people.

During the Reagan years, they set out to squash the unions in the United States and they succeeded. They went from 35% unionization to 20% to 15% to 12%. The Americans are now down to 9% unionization, and believe me, wages followed, because free collective bargaining had been the only way to elevate the standard of wages and working conditions of the people of the United States. Now they are wondering where all those good union jobs have gone that paid $20 an hour and provided a pension, the jobs that people could raise a family on. Guess what, they do not exist any more. The Americans effectively stamped out the unions because their right wing think tanks told them that it was the way to prosperity.

Our right wing think tanks are telling the government that the road to prosperity means stamping out unions and pushing back and that the notion that people deserve a fair wage and a decent pension is a wild expectation that we can no longer afford. If we buy into that bill of goods, we will be following the Americans right down that same path, because it was middle class consumers who were the United States' greatest strength.

We have not followed the Americans there yet. We are still about 30% or 32% unionized. However, we can see it in the eyes of the guys across the floor that they hate unions. They would love to stamp out unions if they could get away with it. Also in their eyes is the notion of those fat pensions. What is fat about them?

When Marcel Massé stole the $30 billion surplus in the public service pension plan, which I do not hesitate to say he did, we did some research. The average public service pensioner is a woman, aged about 68 to 70, making $9,000 a year from her pension. That $30 billion the Liberal government stole from the public service pension plan and gave in the form of corporate tax cuts to its friends could have doubled the pension of every person collecting a public service pension benefit and we would still have change left over.

There has been a successive assault on fair wages and the notion of pensions, which can be traced right back to Thomas d'Aquino. The unofficial prime minister of Canada dictated that is what they needed to do and a bunch of toady governments, from the Liberal toady government to the Conservative toady government, fell successively into line and implemented and executed just about every single thing on his wish list. They ticked them off one by one, and if we keep following them they will want to re-create Canada in the image of the United States, and it is not a pretty sight south of the border, believe me.

[Asbestos, June 23rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, asbestos is the greatest industrial killer the world has ever known. More people die from asbestos than from all other industrial causes combined, yet Canada continues to be one of the largest producers and exporters in the world.

Without exaggeration, we are exporting human misery on a monumental scale and yet we are taking active steps to ensure that companies do not even warn their customers, the third world and developing nations, where we are dumping hundreds of thousands of tonnes of asbestos. Conservatives do not think it should even have a warning label on it.

Our position is morally and ethically reprehensible. Do they not realize the black eye they are giving our country--

[Petitions, June 23rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise to present a petition on behalf of literally thousands of Canadians from all across the country calling upon Parliament to recognize that asbestos is the greatest industrial killer that the world has ever known. They point out that more people die from asbestos than all other industrial causes combined and yet, they point out, Canada remains one of the largest producers and exporters of asbestos in the world.

This petition calls upon Canada to stop spending millions of dollars subsidizing the asbestos industry, as well as to stop blocking international efforts to curb its use.

Therefore, the petitioners call upon Parliament to ban asbestos in all of its forms and institute a just transition program for any asbestos workers or miners and the communities in which they live in, to end all government subsidies of asbestos both in Canada and abroad, and to stop blocking international health and safety conventions designed to protect workers from asbestos, such as the Rotterdam Convention.

[Business of Supply, June 22nd, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I only just tuned in the last few minutes, but I heard some discouraging remarks about the NDP's reputation when it comes to small business.

I come from the socialist paradise of Manitoba and I think my colleague might be interested to know that when we took power in 1999, the most recent government, the government of Gary Doer, one of the most successful provincial governments in the history of Canada, the small business tax imposed by the Conservatives was 11%. I think my colleague would be interested to know that it went down from 11% to 10% to 9% to 8% to 7% to 6% to 5% to 4% to 3%.

I think my colleague would be interested to know that the small business tax in Manitoba is now zero. It is a big fat goose egg. There is no small business tax in Manitoba.

My colleague is sadly mistaken about the treatment of small businesses. Her colleague from Winnipeg North will say that there is a payroll tax. The payroll tax is for businesses with a payroll of $1 million-plus, and it is 2%.

Maybe she should get her facts straight before she starts slagging the NDP's position toward small business. Small business has only one friend in this Parliament and it is the New Democratic Party.

[Asbestos, June 21st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, Canada's position on asbestos is morally and ethically reprehensible, and even as we speak, teams of Department of Justice lawyers have been dispatched to Geneva to sabotage the Rotterdam Convention once again, the list of hazardous chemicals that require prior informed consent to trade.

Canada is already an international pariah for its policy on asbestos, for dumping it into the third world when we will not use it ourselves.

How can we in all good conscience block efforts to put labels on asbestos to warn its recipients to take health and safety protections against this class A carcinogen? What kind of country are we?

[Resumption and Continuation of Postal Services Legislation, June 21st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I want to know if the member will at least take note of or recognize that the root cause of the labour dispute, the impasse we are debating today, finds its origins in the fact that successive federal governments have used Canada Post as a cash cow and have demanded dividends from it in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars of dividends that go into general revenue.

There would be no shortfall in the pension plan of the workers of Canada Post if the Government of Canada was not harvesting revenue. The mandate of Canada Post is supposed to be to deliver mail to a maximum number of Canadians for the least amount of money, not to generate revenue for the government.

The government, in imposing this back to work legislation, is adding insult to injury in that it is the root cause for the impasse because it is gouging Canada Post of all this revenue and milking it like a cash cow instead of putting it into delivering mail.