Randall Garrison

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, earlier in a response to one of the hon. member's speeches, I trucked out what I called blue herrings, raising issues about unions and policing that really nobody shared. I have never met a rank and file police officer who is worried about being intimidated over the question of a union, and all of the police forces have unions.

It is one thing to deny the existence of unions or their value, but it is another thing to gut collective bargaining, as the government is doing in Bill C-7. To me, those are equally difficult to accept.

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie for his work on a day-to-day basis in the House as an effective voice for working people.

His question gives me an opportunity to say again what I think has happened in Bill C-14 and again in Bill C-7. I do not know where the Liberals get these restrictions they have introduced in both bills. I think Bills C-14 and C-7 alike are headed to litigation.

Rather than solving the problem and getting on with the business of the country, we will be sending people back into the courts on both of these bills. I do not understand why the recommendations in Bill C-14 were not those of the special committee. In Bill C-7, I do not know who made these recommendations. There is no evidence about why things like staffing and harassment were excluded from collective bargaining. I do not know where this idea came from, but I certainly doubt that it is constitutional.

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George is one of the new members whose comments and contributions I have learned to respect in the House. He raises a very good point.

Having a union is not necessarily something that always increases costs. Given the context the government has given with respect to the RCMP, which is essentially a budget cut, it is not enough money to keep up with the increasing costs. We know that it is not enough money to backfill all of those empty positions that have been sitting there, unfortunately under the previous Conservative government.

However, the process of collective bargaining can also lead to more effective and efficient policing, which is less costly for those communities. When rank and file RCMP officers on the west shore were calling to have those positions filled, the municipalities were passing resolutions saying that they knew they would have to pay more but they needed to fill those positions to keep their communities safe.

Therefore, I recognize the challenge of increasing policing costs for municipalities as I sat on a municipal council after the police board. However, having a union can also promote efficiency and effectiveness as well.

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the parliamentary secretary for his question because it allows me to once again say that he is dead wrong on this. If this bill does not pass, the RCMP has the right to unionize. That is what the Supreme Court has said. Therefore, the principle is already there in the Supreme Court decision, that if we do not have this legislation, it can unionize.

I have said that this regime, which demands or requires one national union and one exclusive to policing, is a good idea. However, that is not just my opinion, that is the opinion of most of the police officers, and certainly of their associations.

When it comes to saying that by voting against this, I am voting against collective bargaining, I would say the opposite. Voting for a bill that leaves essentially only pay and benefits to be bargained is not collective bargaining. All of those other issues that are excluded are at the heart of what most people want to do as part of their union, not just to get more money or benefits, but to have a workplace that contributes to doing the job well.

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

I did see him in the precinct today, Madam Speaker. He now works for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, so he is still doing very good work.

The Supreme Court of Canada decision is what brought us to where we are today. It is interesting that the Supreme Court has very rarely overruled itself. It has very rarely overruled its previous decisions. In 1999, it had upheld the prohibition on an RCMP union, so I would say it was very unexpected in the legal community that there was such a clear decision in January 2015 in favour of the right of the RCMP members to unionize. It was a six-to-one decision at that time.

Let me read a couple of quotes from the Supreme Court majority in that decision. It states:

We conclude that the s. 2(d) guarantee of freedom of association protects a meaningful process of collective bargaining that provides employees with a degree of choice and independence sufficient to enable them to determine and pursue their collective interests.

It is saying that the regime that was in place, the staff representatives, did not provide what other Canadians were entitled to under the charter, which was to have a choice about who represents them and have those representatives be independent of the RCMP management in this case.

The decision went on to state:

While the RCMP’s mandate differs from that of other police forces, there is no evidence that providing the RCMP a labour relations scheme similar to that enjoyed by other police forces would prevent it from fulfilling its mandate.

What it is really saying is what we know to be true, that in order to have restrictions on rights in Canada, our Constitution requires that they be reasonable, demonstrably justified, and proportionate to some public interest. What the court found in this case is that there was no public interest that justified these kinds of restrictions on collective bargaining for the RCMP.

Quite often in the House, we have talked about “deadlines” set by the Supreme Court: in the case of assisted suicide and in the case of this bill on RCMP unionization. I have always argued, and will still argue, that these are not deadlines. What the court said in both of these cases is that it finds the existing laws unconstitutional, but it will give Parliament a chance to legislate if it wishes to do something different. If Parliament does not legislate by this date, then the law that was in existence will be unconstitutional and the normal legal framework will apply. If we did not pass this by the deadline, which we clearly have not, the RCMP would fall under the Public Service Labour Relations Act.

I am not arguing that we do not need a bill. I actually think there are some justifications for having a bill and for separating the RCMP out from other labour relations associations. The surprise, or not surprise, I guess I would say, is that the Canadian Police Association and the Mounted Police Professional Association also agree with that. There is no demand for all of them to become teamsters or steelworkers. That is not what they are looking for.

Bill C-7 says that there should be one national union representing police only, and that is not really a controversial point, so having a bill that would establish that framework is not a bad idea. However, that is probably about as far as I can go with Bill C-7, because the other main provisions of the bill take away all the aspects that really make meaningful collective bargaining.

I would submit that, just like the bill that was presented on assisted suicide, Bill C-14, Bill C-7 is probably unconstitutional. It is certain to launch another whole round of litigation and will force the spending of both RCMP members' money and public money, as well as the court's time on something we really do not need to do.

The court decision was quite clear at six to one. If we respected that decision in the proposed law, we would be done with this. The new regime of labour relations could then get on with the job of improving the RCMP and the working conditions, including the health and safety of RCMP members. Again, we must remember that our constitutional regime says that the limits are acceptable on rights only if they are reasonable and demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society, and if these limits are proportional to a specific public objective.

What is the public objective in saying that this new labour relations organization could not talk about staffing, deployment, harassment, or discipline? Again, in the quote I read earlier from the decision, it is very clear that the court said that there is no public objective that justifies limiting collective bargaining for the RCMP. Therefore, I would argue that, in parallel, there is also no public objective being achieved by these specific exclusions from collective bargaining.

I do not think we have heard from the government why it selected these things. I have not heard the justification for these exclusions, and the Liberals have not given me a legal argument of how they think this would stand up in court, if we get there again. As I said, I think Bill C-7 is bound for litigation, and that is an unfortunate thing.

Our courts are clogged with all kinds of important issues, and to have their time taken up with something that has been there in 1999 and 2015, to have it back sometime later this year or in 2017 is a waste of everyone's time and resources.

I, of course, as a member of the NDP, supported our position that these exclusions should have been taken out at committee stage. Unfortunately, the government failed to do that, and I believe the Conservatives also supported leaving these exclusions in. However, I will give credit to the government here that it did agree to remove clauses 40 and 42, which would have placed occupational health and safety under workers' compensation boards province by province.

Clearly, there are some exceptional things about the RCMP as a workforce, and it would not have been acceptable to establish a regime where RCMP members, depending on where they were stationed, would be eligible for different kinds of compensation, benefits, or rehabilitation. Therefore, I do applaud the government in agreeing with both the Conservatives and the NDP to take out clauses 40 and 42 and keep occupational health and safety a uniform regime across the country, so that it would not really matter where an RCMP member served, because RCMP members would be entitled to the same package of benefits and protections.

When we talk about staffing, deployment, harassment, and discipline being excluded, what does that actually mean? This is where I go back to all four things I dealt with almost 20 years ago when I first took on being the labour relations representative of my police board.

Staffing is the question of how much work one has to do, whether the vacant positions are filled, and how long is acceptable to leave positions vacant. I know from the RCMP in my own riding on the west shore, where the population was growing and the demands were very great, that there was concern from rank and file members over those four positions that they should have had, that were authorized, but I believe took six years to fill, and it could have been longer. My memory does not serve me so well, because it was so long in actually getting the people they needed.

What impact does that have on the operation of the RCMP? Well, one could say that it causes it to spend more money or it takes away management prerogatives. However, I can tell members that, from the point of view of rank and file people, staffing is about how much overtime they have to work that they do not want to work, that they would rather spend with their family, or rather spend, as most RCMP officers do, volunteering in community events. They wonder if they would be forced to work overtime because those vacancies have not been filled.

This is not to say that the new union of the members would fill the vacancies or decide when they are filled, but they might be able to argue in bargaining what a reasonable time frame would be when a position is not filled. They could say in their collective agreement that, when a position is vacant, it must be filled within six months or within a year. Why is that not something they could bargain about? It is something certainly that I bargained about with our police union: what is an acceptable time frame for filling vacancies?

I simply do not understand why that would not be subject to collective bargaining for the RCMP.

The second one would be deployment. The question of deployment was that of relief and backup, in particular, in municipal forces. How many officers per car? Was it safe to have one officer per car, or did it require two? Through negotiations, after I left the board, it was finally resolved that there were different hours of the day that required different deployment and staffing.

However, what we got through collective bargaining was the input of those rank-and-file members who said that in the daytime it was probably okay to have one officer per car because there were a lot of people on duty, and a lot of resources and backup to call on. However, at nighttime, one person in the car, at three a.m., was probably not a good idea. That was what we were discussing at that time. Again, I do not see how that does not do anything but contribute to better policing for the community and better working conditions for the RCMP, to be able to discuss deployment.

The RCMP also has a lot of very small detachments. One of the big problems that comes up in those detachments is relief. If the RCMP officer is the only officer or one of two officers in a community, how does he or she get any relief from the 24-hour a day demands? What would be wrong with negotiating that if he or she has been the only one, or the only two officers, for a certain period of time, then someone has to come in and relieve the officer of those duties? That would be discussed at collective bargaining. Again, it is about better community policing and better working conditions for RCMP members.

The question of harassment is the one that is the most shocking to me. We dealt with harassment in the police force. When I was appointed to the board, I was the first openly gay police board member in British Columbia. We sat down with the union. First, I had met with the chief, and I said, “Just so you know, my mother already knows.” The chief said, “We already know. We are not called the police for nothing.” We got off to a very good start by having harassment training.

The union met with the board, and we agreed to do harassment training. No one forced anyone to do training. The Board members said that they would go through the training first, and would then ask the union to agree to go through it.

The union president at that time said that it was a complete waste of time. At the end of it, he came back and said that he was wrong, that there were practices taking place in our force that he did not even recognize as harassment.

The last one is discipline. When there is bargaining about discipline, it is not saying the rank-and-file members get to decide if someone is disciplined. They need a voice on what is a fair process for discipline and a voice on what is fair representation.

Those are the kinds of issues with which I had to deal. What are the right time frames? What evidence should be available? Are police officers held to the legal standards of the court in their own disciplinary proceedings? Is that fair or should there be some other disciplinary process agreed to?

Again, all four of these things that are excluded are crucial to having a good working environment for RCMP rank-and-file members, and they also contribute to better policing of our communities.

I know my time is drawing short, but I want to talk about one more staffing issue which has been on my radar since I first got involved in policing. It is the question of recruitment and retirement. It will probably come to a shock to most members in the House that one out of ten police officers in the entire country is currently eligible to retire tomorrow. Officers are staying on and working because of their dedication, but they are already eligible to retire.

How will we deal with that crisis of person power in the RCMP? One of the best ways to do that is to work with the members of the RCMP who are serving now and ask them what are reasonable ways to conquer what is really a crisis.

The other one is recruitment. At the beginning there was some resistance, even in our police force, to using diversity as a criteria in recruiting. We worked with the union at the time. Again, the same union president came back to me and said that when I said that we were not a very diverse police force—we were are all white men—that this was obvious. What was not obvious were the benefits that would come to policing from having a more diverse police force.

They hired two people from the first nations community and two gay and lesbian police officers. He told me that they now had contacts in communities that they never had before, and it helped them do a better job of policing.

Again, negotiating with the rank-and-file unions about issues of staffing, like recruitment, retention, and retirement, will lead to better policing for all of us.

I am sorry I cannot vote for the bill that would establish a framework for a union for the RCMP, but my reason for doing that is the unacceptable exclusions from collective bargaining.

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I would like to start in a way that almost all members have when they began speaking to Bill C-7 and express my thanks to the RCMP for the work its members do every day in our communities and at the federal level in policing to keep us safe. We have one of the most dedicated and skilled police forces anywhere in the world, but it can be improved. It can be better.

I know it is going to get better because, like others who have already spoken, I know one of the new people out front this week. He is one of the people I met as a young leader when he was in high school in Esquimalt; he eventually became our house- and dog-sitter, and now he is out front as a new RCMP officer, defending this House instead of our house at home.

I have also seen the RCMP at work in my own constituency. The West Shore RCMP polices over half of my riding, by geography, with 65 sworn members, and it was fortunate enough to get four added in 2015, which did a little bit to catch up with the population growth. I have a riding that is growing very rapidly in population, and it is most rapid in the areas policed by the RCMP. They always have a challenge in keeping up with that.

I personally have also seen the RCMP at work as part of UN peacekeeping missions. I served in East Timor, where the RCMP played a very important role in training the new police force that was being established in that country, and it did a really excellent job, which was well respected by others who were also involved in police training. I also saw the RCMP at work in Afghanistan when I was part of an international human rights mission there, and I saw the very difficult task that Canadian RCMP members had taken on in trying to help train the Afghan police in a real absence of a tradition of independent and rights-based policing like the one we have in Canada.

I think there are some 84 RCMP members who are serving on UN peacekeeping missions around the world at this time. So like everyone in the House, we do appreciate the service of the RCMP and its dedication.

I am also familiar with the issues of policing because I taught criminal justice for 20 years in a program at Camosun College in Victoria, which is largely a police and prison guard training program. Many of my former students have gone on to be RCMP members. At very large demonstrations or walks in my riding I have been talking to some of the police, and once someone came over and asked if I was in some kind of trouble and offered to help. I said that, no, they were my ex-students and I actually knew the police and there was no problem.

I am probably also one of a very small number of members in the House who sat across from a police union as the employer in bargaining, so I started my public career as a member of a municipal police board. As a member of the police board, I drew the short straw, as we all thought it was, and I was assigned finance and collective bargaining. I actually did sit across from the police union of a very small municipal police force and hashed through the kind of issues that are of concern in the RCMP today. Therefore, I know something about that from personal experience, and I will come back to that.

As the NDP public safety critic for the last five years, I have worked very closely with the Canadian Police Association and also with the Mounted Police Professional Association. They have been very concerned to make progress after the Supreme Court decision almost a year and a half ago now toward getting organization in place to represent the rank and file RCMP. I want to credit the work of both Tom Stamatakis as president of the Canadian Police Association and Rae Banwarie as president of the Mounted Police Professional Association for working with all members of the House in trying to make sure we get the right kind of legislation in place.

There is a long history of controversy about police unions in this country. It stretches all the way back to when the first unions were certified, and that was in 1918, I believe, although I have not been teaching this now for a number of years. Toronto and Vancouver both certified unions for their police in 1918. We went through a series of strikes including the general strike in Winnipeg, a police strike in the U.K., and a police strike in Toronto. It ushered in a period of regulation of police unions and attempts to restrict rights to bargain and rights to strike. Up to World War II, we had periods of greater and lesser freedom of police to unionize, in all areas but never the RCMP.

At the end of World War II, in 1945, I think largely as a result of the idea that we had fought a great war for democracy and freedom, very large collective bargaining rights in the public sector began to be granted, including the Toronto police union, which was again certified as a bargaining agent for the Toronto police in 1945. That movement really grew over the next 20 years, until virtually all the police forces had unionized, except the RCMP.

In the 1960s, when public servants were granted the right to have unions, even to strike under some circumstances, the RCMP was specifically excluded. Therefore, what we are really dealing with today is that exclusion that was written down finally in law in the 1960s.

By the 1970s, there was already discussion about whether it would not be better to allow RCMP members to decide for themselves if they wished to have a union, rather than to keep them under a legislated prohibition. A predecessor here, the former MP for Burnaby—Douglas, Svend Robinson—I think it was in 1979—introduced one of the first bills calling for the removal of the restriction on the right of the RCMP to unionize.

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I always find my colleague's contributions important even though I almost always disagree with him.

In this case I simply do not see where the issue is coming from in terms of whether or not the RCMP wishes to form a union. When surveyed, over half of the uniformed members replied they did wish to have collective bargaining rights. All the other police forces all across the country voluntarily selected to have unions to collectively bargain for them.

It seems to me we are creating some phantom problem here that the Conservatives are trying to solve in their opposition to the bill when no such problem actually exists. In most police forces the rank and file members are quite happy to elect their own representatives in collective bargaining.

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, my question for the member is about what I would call blue herrings, instead of red herrings, and the idea that the Supreme Court required a union. The Supreme Court decision does not require a union. It gives the RCMP members a choice of how they wish to be represented. It simply removed the prohibition on their being in a union. I know he said this is the only case where people are required to have a union, but they are not required by this decision to have a union.

All other police in Canada have chosen freely to have unions, so it seems to me there is a bit of a non-issue here about intimidation to join a union, when police across the country in all the other jurisdictions have joined unions of their own free will.

The second part of that is the idea of a secret ballot. What people are deciding is whether to join an organization or not. No one is required to join a union, even if the union exists and the fact that someone has joined or not joined a union is public. Ultimately, in police unions someone will know what decision a member has made anyway. The idea that somehow the secret ballot that applies in elections applies when members are signing up to be a member of a union or not, it is a completely different issue. I would ask the member for his comments.

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I have a question about what the member just said. She said she thought the RCMP should fall under the same regulations as other public servants and yet that is not what Bill C-7 would do. It would take away fundamental issues from bargaining that in any other workplace would be bargainable, things like harassment in the workplace, staffing and deployment issues. Bill C-7 would actually take those away from RCMP members.

Really, from my point of view, everyone would be better off if this bill did not pass because then the Supreme Court decision would place the RCMP under the same regulations as all other public servants.

[Public Service Labour Relations Act, May 30th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, this is another example of what the Liberals have been doing lately. They are implying that if the bills they are putting forward, narrow and restrictive as they are, do not pass, there would somehow be a legal vacuum and RCMP members would lose their right to organize. That is not true. The Supreme Court decision will come into force and will allow the RCMP to unionize.

By the same token, my question is about the mistake I think the Conservatives are making by conflating the secret ballot with the way one organizes a union. Once the union is organized, it would be quite public as to who is a member of the union and who is not.

No one would be forced to join a union. If people do not wish to be associated with a union, they would not be a member of the union. There is no requirement of membership in any of our trade union facilities. There is a requirement to pay dues, because one receives the benefits of membership, but no one is required to join the union.

Therefore, I am not quite sure how the secret ballot for election applies to the idea of membership in a union.