Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to engage in debate on this bill and the motion to take some time to consider more fully the implications of this bill. I think six months could be time well spent.
I think, had the government thought a little more about the implications of this action, it would not have gone down the road in such a headstrong fashion to trample on the rights of these workers.
I have heard a few themes throughout the day from members opposite. One of them is about big bad unions. They have talked about unions as if they are the devil incarnate. They have talked about them as if they were just plain bad.
I cannot comprehend this because I am sure there are a lot of women and men in their communities, in their constituencies, who through a democratic vote have decided to participate in a union, who have entered into a workplace where a union has been in place. Those constituents have realized a decent working wage, health benefits and perhaps a pension plan, if they are fortunate to be part of the 30% of Canadian workers who are lucky enough to participate in pensions. In other words, they are people who are benefiting from the rights and opportunities of bargaining collectively, of working together, of coming together to have some control within their workplace over wages, benefits and working conditions.
I do not see why any member of this House would want to argue against that. It is as though because people are in a group somehow that is negative as opposed to its being positive to be individuals. How could that be? That simply does not make any sense.
If members took the time to actually look into what kind of an organization a trade union is, they would actually recognize what I know having been a union member, that a union is one of the more democratic organizations in our society. The leadership is elected, not unlike political parties. Decisions and proper process of how that organization runs are set out in bylaws for all people to see. It inevitably has a constitution, which controls how that organization runs. The finances of the organization are completely public. The decision making within the organization is completely public. It has regular general meetings so that all members of the union can participate in the day-to-day activities of that organization.
Because I have been involved in unions for many years, I know for sure that if one member is not happy with how that organization is being run, he or she comes to a meeting, the second Wednesday of every month or whatever it is that the particular union membership decides is going to be its regular meeting time, and the member has an opportunity to stand on the floor to raise those concerns. That is the way unions operate. When it comes to how the unions spend the dues, how they decide to prepare for bargaining, that is all decided by union members.
It is not unlike some other organizations, like political parties, where not everyone who is a member wants to participate in the day-to-day activities, and sometimes members are not happy with how things happen and they grumble and gripe about the decisions that are made but they are not prepared to take a couple of hours on the Wednesday night to go out and participate in those decisions. That happens. However, the important point is that decisions are made by a majority, just as they are in our elections, and the rest of the members of the group or of the constituency live with those results.
I will not speak for any other party in this chamber but, just like our party, the union does not represent just the people who vote for it or the people who participate in it. The union represents all members because its mandate is to be responsible for and to act responsibly on behalf of all the members of the union, to bargain better wages, better working conditions, and to act constructively on behalf of all members whether they participate or not.
I can understand to some extent, given the way the government has acted, that it may not understand that. What I tend to hear is that the government seems to think that if a particular jurisdiction does not have a Conservative member, then that jurisdiction is not going to get the goodies. If people do not have a government member elected in their particular province, then they are not going to see the kind of spoils of the electoral competition that others would. I would say that is completely wrong and our leader, the Leader of the Opposition, has said on many occasions that our responsibility here is to look after the interests of all Canadians, and that is exactly what the NDP caucus has been doing.
That is exactly the role that is played by unions in our society in Canada. It has been for 150 years. Unions have played an important role throughout this country in ensuring we have good social policy. That includes things like our pension, the Canada pension plan; employment insurance; the labour laws that ensure there is a standard work week and that people are not having to work seven days a week, that we do not have child labour, that we have some basic human rights in the workplace, that we have general health and safety, that people are protected and that they have the right to refuse. All of those basic protections that exist in all workplaces have largely resulted from the work by unions, and they have been doing that for 150 years in this country.
Again, I say to members opposite that I urge them not to think so negatively about unions and to recognize that, in fact, they consist of men and women and families who are out there working hard, trying to make their workplace better, trying to ensure they can provide for their families and working every day, tirelessly, to build their communities and make the lives of all Canadians better.
I must say further how concerned I am with a couple of other things that have been repeated by the government. There is this idea that the negotiations have gone on for eight months and that suddenly that is too long. I have been involved in public sector negotiations that have gone on for a couple of years, undoubtedly as a result of problems with both the employer and the union; that have gone on because of circumstances within a given jurisdiction. However, the parties keep negotiating. They keep working away. The parties continue to work to solve problems. Just because it has gone on for a certain period of time and the parties are beginning to apply some pressure to each other does not mean it is time to shut it all down, that we decide time is up and we are going to end this by stepping in. It is also setting a standard that is inappropriate. It is not up to the government to be setting that standard. It is for the parties to decide.
In this instance, we know, if we have been paying any attention at all to the debate and to the interventions by the NDP caucus, the official opposition, that what transpired here is that the parties were having trouble coming to agreement on a number of issues and that the union instigated one of the tools in its toolbox, and it has a number of them. One of the union's tools, the ultimate weapon, is the right to strike. It did not use that, for whatever reason. I think it was largely because the union itself recognized that it was the ultimate weapon and it did not want to shut down postal services in this country completely because it understood that they were at the early stages in negotiations and the parties were still far apart. Therefore, there needed to be some efforts to bring the parties closer together, so the union began to employ tactics that were more subtle and it engaged in slowly rotating strikes.
We have heard from a number of our constituents. We have heard it here. It is in the record. Members opposite have been reading from their toys about communications they have had from their constituents where the constituents said they did not have a problem with the rotating strikes, the strike action that was happening. They did not have a problem with that, but they did have a problem when the crown corporation decided it was going to padlock the doors.
That is when postal services completely ended. That is when the bills and the cheques stopped moving for the small businesses that everybody on the government side seems to talk about. That is when they were shut down, not when the union was employing its tactics. Postal services were shut down when management stepped in and put big padlocks on every single Canada Post workplace in this country. That is when things shut down. We have heard that again and again, so we understand that is what happened.
One would think that the appropriate response to that shutdown would have been to take the padlocks off, open the doors and let the workers go back in and deliver the mail. Would that not have been the solution? Would that not have been the best way to do that?
