SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 317 - May/24/24

May/24/24 12:44:08 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, today is a powerful day, a day that I never thought I would actually see in the House of Commons, after eight efforts over the years in my time to bring forward legislation to protect workers from anti-scab actions by employers to deny them their fundamental rights. We are here today to bring this into law. On my way here, I learned that, today, the International Court of Justice has called out Israel for the brutal genocide that is happening in Gaza and Rafah, calling on Israel to end this horrific campaign. This is a day of justice. I think of Martin Luther King Jr.'s beautiful statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That slogan has been used many times over the years, but what people do not often reflect on is that the bending of that arc of justice is done in the face of immense opposition. It is done in the face of threat. It is done in the face of harassment. It is often done in the face of violence. However, the arc of the moral universe will move, inevitably, toward justice. I was thinking about that, because my mom called me last night. My mom is a hardrock miner's daughter. In fact, her father, Joe MacNeil, started in the Cape Breton coal mines, back when Dominion Steel used to use the army against the coal miners in New Waterford and Glace Bay. They had a classic tactic. They would make the men and the families sleep in tents in the winter to break them. They called them communists, radicals and extremists. There was nothing radical or extreme about fighting for a living wage. What was radical and extreme was the capitalists who would use the army, putting a machine gun in the church steeple in New Waterford to try to intimidate working people. However, in that moral universe, the arc bent relentlessly toward justice, because there is a moment when people just cannot put up with it anymore and will not put up with anymore. Mom called me last night and told me how inspired she was. These are dark times, but my mom always sees hope. She said to me that she was so inspired to see the young people marching out of those university commencements, university students in the United States who were putting their careers on the line, facing serious harassment, being called all kinds of hateful things by an establishment that wants to shut them down. My mom said that young people get it. They are not going to sit silent in the face of a genocide. Again, what bends toward justice is bending in the face of the harassment and the intimidation and the false threats that these young students are somehow extremists and radicals. There is nothing extreme about speaking up against the mass killing of children. What is extreme is going along with it, like last night. When the International Criminal Court has called for indictments against Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, the government and its key ministers would be drinking wine and schnaps with Israeli leaders here in Ottawa. We can say that we are friends. We are. Canada has a long, deep friendship with Israel, but friends do not let friends commit war crimes. My mom said that she was so inspired by these young people who are standing up, walking out and marching in the streets. My mother said to me that she was going to get her walker and go down and walk with them. My mother has never been to a demonstration in her life, but she sees the mark of—

623 words

Context: House Hansard - 317 - May/24/24

Mr. Charlie Angus

May/24/24 12:48:48 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, I invite the hon. member to come talk to my mom. She would give him a few lessons in moral justice. The reason why I am talking about my mom is that my mom is a hard-rock miner's daughter. My mom always said to me to do the right thing throughout my life. Do we know what my dad said? He said to never cross a picket line. That was the family that we grew up in. When my mom calls me about justice, I listen, and I think the hon. member should listen about justice too, because my mom is not an extremist. My mom stands up for what is right. We are all called to stand up for what is right, which brings us to this bill. Year in and year out, workers have had to fight for their basic right to be recognized. If they are facing injustice or poor pay, they have a right to withdraw their labour. Nobody ever gave the union movement or the labour movement anything in this country, certainly not any Conservative who has ever lived. In my community, the fight for the eight-hour day was won at the Coniagas Mine in 1914. The miners who went on strike at the Coniagas Mine knew what the consequences were. The consequences were that half that workforce was fired and their families were evicted from their homes. None of those men were radicals or extremists like the Conservatives of the time called them, but they had reached a point where they were not going to put up with the brutal conditions underground anymore. They knew what the odds were. They knew that, if they stood up, many of them would be thrown out on the street, their families not able to be fed. They did it for the bigger vision, the bigger right. The arc of the moral universe may be long and it may take a long time, but it bends inevitably toward justice. I think of all the strikes and labour battles that we have seen in the north and some of them have been brutal. They are stories that are told in our region. There was the 1958 Inco strike, which one of my old-timer friends, Mike Farrell, told me was the Mine Mill union's Stalingrad. Families lost everything in that fight. They lost homes. They lost their cars. They lost their marriages. When I was walking with the copper and nickel miners in 2010 during the Vale strike, their grandchildren told me that their grandfather and grandmother were in that 1958 strike and that they were there today to live up to that obligation, because the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, because people know what is right. What I see from Conservatives is that they tell me that we should not speak up about international things and just talk about what is at home. That is not the Canadian way. That we should not get involved in something that has nothing to do with us is not the Canadian way. The Canadian way is that we bend toward justice because it is the right thing. We are at this moment in Parliament where we may finally pass anti-scab. I have to say that I have my suspicions. If a Conservative government comes in, does one actually think Conservatives will ever defend workers? There is not a chance. We are going to see them stand up and see whether they stand for the right thing, because this is the moment. I was talking about the strikes in the north. There is nothing more bitter than when someone brings in scabs to tell a family that they are going to starve them out, that they are going to bust them, that they are going to use the cops and use the state to beat workers down and take away the one right that we have as workers, the right to either supply our employment or take it away if we are not being treated with justice. We have had many of these horrific battles. It was mentioned earlier about Peggy Witte, one of the most horrible corporate leaders ever, who was lionized by the Canadian mining industry and who led to the nine men being killed in Yellowknife's Giant Mine. What they also do not tell us about what Peggy Witte did was that she robbed the pensions of workers from my region at Pamour mine, and she got away with it. We have to have laws that protect workers and protect them in strikes so that they can engage fairly. On this day, when we are here at the final moment to maybe get past the finish line with anti-scab, while the international community is now calling out the genocide in Gaza, we have to think about how powerful it is to be at this moment. Yes, the struggle is long, the struggle is hard and the struggle does not end easy, but we have to always bend that power toward justice, fairness and the right of the individual, whether in their union or as a civil human being, to live in dignity. That is what we are here for.

882 words

Context: House Hansard - 317 - May/24/24

Mr. Charlie Angus

May/24/24 12:58:26 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, I will share with my colleague that when I was in his region on Vancouver Island, I visited a graveyard that had been desecrated. The graves of Japanese families who worked in the mines were desecrated in the Second World War. There was a plaque on the wall saying miners had rebuilt the graveyard as best they could. The plaque was made by the nickel and copper miners who belonged to Mine Mill Local 598 in Sudbury. The miners heard about what had happened to the Japanese and raised money in the 1950s so that people on Vancouver Island would know that their comrades were there. That is the arc of justice. It bends because people stand up and say they are going to make it bend, and that is what we are here to do today.

139 words