Friday, February 14, 2003 Mr. Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, NDP): Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to join the debate on Bill C-25, an act to modernize the public service. I will keep my remarks brief because we are optimistic that by the end of the day we may be able to forward this bill on to the committee where the important work shall begin in doing a comprehensive review and analysis of the bill. Comprehensive is the operative word because it is a huge piece of legislation. It is a very ambitious piece of legislation undertaken by the President of the Treasury Board. There is optimism in the labour community and among public sector employees that we are looking at meaningful change that will go beyond legislative change, but may, if successful, actually change the culture of the public service. That would be something we would all celebrate. As is often the case, perhaps the best quote with regard to this new bill comes from Hugh Winsor. In the Globe and Mail he pointed out that as far as government goes, the less one intends to do about something, the more one has to study it. It is the rule of inverse proportionality. I do not know if other members have mentioned this, but we note that the role of civil servants has been the subject of no fewer than 37 indepth studies in the last 40 years. Many of those studies made broad, sweeping recommendations. Many were entered into with the same optimism that I express today and none of them have really resulted in comprehensive changes in the way we do business as a public service. The reason there is some room for optimism this time around is that we are starting with legislative change. We are attempting to fix the structural, skeletal aspect of the problems and then we can deal with the minutiae later on. That is why on the face of it the NDP caucus welcomes this undertaking. We commit that we will throw ourselves into it with all the attention it deserves. I somewhat regret that instead of debating the bill I find myself forced to debate the amendment that was put forward, that the bill should be withdrawn and the subject matter thereof referred to the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates. That amendment would contemplate throwing out all the work that has been done to date. This would include the comprehensive 18 month study, the Fryer report. It would include the work of the task force led by deputy minister Ran Quail. Essentially it would bring up the matter of how to amend public service legislation at the newly formed committee on government operations and estimates. I strongly suspect that the proposed amendment has more to do with political mischief than any sincere interest in addressing the copious problems that face our public sector employees. I am critical, as I say, that I am in a position now that my comments have to be taken in the context of debating a hoist motion rather than the bill which we had hoped would make meaningful amendments. Having said that, let me speak to the importance of amending public service legislation. We should frame this in the context that the 1990s were a terrible decade for our public sector. There were seven years of wage freezes. Civil servants had to live through the madness of program review, which resulted in-- 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. Mr. Ken Epp (Elk Island, Canadian Alliance): Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be able to speak on Bill C-25. The whole subject of employer-employee relationships and employer-employee relations has been an interest of mine for a great number of years. I have indicated on numerous occasions that for 27 years I taught at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in mathematics and computing. For four years before that, when I was just a kid, I taught high school. Believe it or not, in both of those environments I was involved with employer-employee relationships in a very real way. I was always astounded when I first graduated from university. I really was just a kid. I was 22 years old, I had two degrees and away I went into the work world. I graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with great pride and unfortunately could not get a job in Saskatchewan. When Alberta beckoned and offered me a job, saying that it had never yet been disappointed in a graduate from the University of Saskatchewan, I took the job. Suddenly, I was the math department in a small rural high school in Alberta. I was just a young person, 22 years old, offering in-service to the other teachers because we were going through the years of new math. The reason I bring this in that it all ties together. As a result of doing this in-service work, I got to know many teachers throughout the whole county. At one of the annual meetings of the Alberta Teachers' Association local there, I suddenly was elected, just this young fellow from Saskatchewan, to be the president of the ATA local. One might call it a teachers' union. We always called it a professional association. It was a very interesting experience, because as soon as one has the opportunity to work representing other people one immediately finds ways of bringing together people who are far apart. I found it an incredibly valuable experience, because 95% to 99% of relationships between employers and employees are healthy and good and work fine, but there is always that 1% to 5% where a conflict develops for one reason or another. How do we reconcile that? How do we bring those people together? Of course it becomes a real mixture of psychology and sociology and a whole bunch of other things, and often very little mathematics, although I did apply some mathematics to it. I discovered that if there are two people, there is only one relationship between the two of them. If there are three people, there are three relationships. If I had a way of drawing a diagram, there are person A and person B, so there is that one, persons B and C, and persons A and B, so there are three relationships. That grows geometrically as the number of people increases. For example, if there are 16 people there are 120 relationship pairs. When we have thousands of people in a civil service, like we have in Canada, we cannot expect that there would not occasionally be frictions between the personalities, so employer-employee relationships and inter-employee relationships become very important. One discovery I made early on when I was a young kid teaching high school math and involved in the ATA was that we have to learn to co-operate. One has to forgive. There has to be an attitude of acceptance and understanding. There has to be a culture like this one: I like my job, I like the people I work with, what I am doing is worthwhile, it is valued by my employer, and it is valued by my clients, whoever they are. In the civil service, these clients are usually citizens of our country. Many of our civil servants work with citizens of other countries. All of us, regardless of our position, even members of Parliament, have to work on those interpersonal relationships. When the President of the Treasury Board brings forward Bill C-25 and says that the government is going to modernize the public service, I would like to emphasize that underlying this is the foundation of value for each individual who works in the public service. I also became involved in this when I went to the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. Lo and behold, there were about 750 professional staff members there who honoured me by electing me as their first president of the academic staff association at NAIT. Until that time, we had been forced members of AUPE, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, whether we wanted to be or not. Even then, before I was the president of the staff association, I was elected president of branch 38 of AUPE. I had an opportunity there, and later as the staff association president in taking part in the formation of our new staff association, to build on the important foundations I discovered earlier in my life. It was an interesting experience. There is one thing I want to comment on. Bill C-25 includes the whole subject of arbitration and conciliation and methods of solving disputes. I would like to advise the President of the Treasury Board and all Liberal members here today, the huge crowd of them, that they need to do this right. I will share a personal experience. When I was the president of the staff association, for our very first contract we put our heads together and asked whether we wanted the right to strike. A number of members said no. They felt that the only time members need the right to strike is when a situation cannot be solved in any other way. So we reasoned. If we have an argument with our neighbour about where a fence should be, we have a court system and a legal system in which that can be arbitrated. It can be determined. We do not have to picket in front of our neighbour's house stating he is being unfair because his trees are on our land or whatever the problem is. That is not how to solve these types of situations. We find out where the boundary is and we have to live with the decision. That is true in every area of conflict. There is a mechanism or there are developing mechanisms in our country to solve those conflicts, through hearings, through arbitration, through conciliation and whatnot. We argued that for ourselves the right to strike was a means to an end, not an end in itself. We bargained away in our very first contract on a clause which was set up so that it would be perpetual in subsequent contracts. Both parties had to agree if the clause were to be removed. Once the clause was in there, unless both parties agreed to remove it, it would stay in there perpetually, which is a good way of putting it. We put into that clause a whole sequence of arbitrations and mediators and everything, a whole dispute resolution mechanism so that disputes could be properly solved. It worked really fine. Now I am going to take a slam at the provincial government of Alberta. It worked really fine until those guys in the government, and I am talking now as an employee, those guys in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, passed a rule which stated that in cases of arbitration, the arbitrator must take into account government policy. That seemed like a really innocuous little statement, but it threw a pile of sand into the smooth working gears of our relationship. After that, when it came time to negotiate a new round of salary agreements or whatever the government would simply, in advance of that, make a public announcement. This was when inflation was 8% to 10% per year. The government would say that its policy that year was that no government employee shall have a raise increase exceeding 2%. That blew us out of the water. It made it very unfair because it said we could not bargain fairly. If we could not come to an agreement we could go to arbitration because we had binding arbitration. If binding arbitration was there the government had already passed a rule that we had to take into account government policy and it had declared the policy was 2%. That was the end of the show. The House can see how frustrated we were. It landed up that we were there in the boxing ring and the person with whom we were boxing was also the referee. It made it very unfair. My advice to that vast group of Liberals who would impose this legislation is to ensure that where there is arbitration and where there is conciliation that it be kept fair. If the Liberals do not, they will cause unrest in the civil service which they do not want. That is a very important principle. I am arguing a principle, not specifically the wording of the bill. I expect the committee will look after that.
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