- Feb/26/24 4:10:24 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I can tell the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader, first of all, is that I did ask the Minister of Labour when this bill was first introduced whether the federal sector was included, and he indicated it was not. I think that is an opportunity. If it is sauce for the goose, it should be sauce for the gander.
The Conservatives are going to look at what amendments are put forward. As I said, there are some areas where I think the bill needs improvement, so we will be looking for that. At the end of the day, we will look forward to what happens at committee.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House to speak. Today, we are speaking to Bill C-58, which is the legislation that would ban replacement workers. I have some relevant experience on all sides of this issue, being the daughter of someone whose mother was a teacher who went on strike and whose father was a member of the Canadian Auto Workers union who went on strike. My daughter is a nurse. My other daughter is a teacher. I was married to a union welder, a proud member of local 663 and one of the 5,000 union members in Sarnia—Lambton. We are well known worldwide for our high-quality and high-safety performance, and it is certainly considered to be a union town.
At the same time, I worked for many years with Dow Chemical. In the late 1980s, there was a strike, and I was a scab in the strike. I did security and lab testing and had to cross the picket line. I had the experience of how things can escalate during those strike experiences. I bring all of that to my speech today.
I will start out by saying that I am very surprised to see the Liberal government come forward with this legislation. I think about how the Liberals handle their own business. They have increased the use of contractors and consultants by over 60%; it is in the billions of dollars. Is that not really replacement workers from the PSAC union workers who do the work? I think about the arrive scam situation. There is a whole IT department in the government that is full of federal union-sector employees, yet the government decided to get two guys in a basement from GC Strategies and give them $20 million so that they could outsource from other replacement workers. I think the ArriveCAN is to the tune of north of $60 million in costs, but the two guys in the basement, who did no work on it, got $20 million. Certainly, there are lots of people who can outsource and procure within the government; again, are they not replacement workers?
Further, I would note that the government has failed to include federal-sector employees as part of the scope of this legislation. There were 120,000 PSAC workers who went on strike. Therefore, if the government thinks this is a terrific idea, in conjunction with its NDP coalition partners, should it not have said that, if it is great for everybody else, we should put that in place here? Those are just some of the considerations that went through my mind when I started to think about what we needed to do here.
The other example that I would talk about would be the government's taking $40 billion of taxpayer money to put into the Stellantis plant and the battery plant in St. Thomas to create 3,000 jobs and then turning around and, as we found out in the contract, saying there are going to be 1,600 Korean replacement workers. Again, the hypocrisy of the government in the way it acts versus the way it brings this legislation forward makes me really ask the question of whether the government really does support this concept or just has to do something to pacify its NDP marriage partners.
One of the things that are missing in terms of what is in the legislation is something to do with essential workers. We have had a lot of strikes in Canada. There were 147 work stoppages in 2023 alone. It is to the point that we get rail strikes, port strikes and all these different strikes, and our partners in the U.S. are starting to consider that Canada is not a reliable supply chain. Therefore, something needs to be done to address that.
I am fully behind the right to collective bargaining. I am fully behind people having the ability to negotiate fairly, but what is happening is that people are not negotiating, and then, all of a sudden, at the eleventh hour, the impact is felt by everyone. It is felt by CN Rail, where strikes happened. It is thousands and thousands of dollars to businesses. It is inconvenience to travellers, in many cases. We have all seen empty shelves as a result of port strikes. The United States has legislation for essential workers. The way it works is it defines what is considered an essential service or an essential worker, including essential infrastructure for the supply chain and nurses and medical professionals.
What the Americans put in place is this. They have, say, four years between every negotiation. One month before they would go into a strike action place, they have to go to binding arbitration. That causes people to get more serious about negotiating early on and not waiting until the eleventh hour. Think of the parents who every year are threatened with strikes by teachers. All of a sudden there is no child care. It is fine to say we have $10-a-day child care, but if the spaces do not exist, that does not help them, and if the kids cannot go to school, that does not help them either. There are huge impacts that we are missing, and I would have liked to see something in this legislation to address them in a similar way to how they are addressed in the U.S.
The second thing I would say is that there are a couple of technical things I do not think have been well considered. I have worked at chemical and petrochemical facilities and with nuclear and the mining sector. These facilities cannot be shut down on a dime. When it comes to the strike date and time to shut them down, it is not safe to do that. The language in the bill talks about how the only time replacement workers could be used in the case of a strike would be if a specific harm was identified that would occur. The problem with chemical plants, nuclear facilities and whatnot when there is a strike is that we do not know exactly what is going to leak, catch fire, impact the environment or whatever. Something will go wrong; we just do not know specifically what that is, so it would be impossible, then, with the current phraseology, to justify any replacement workers. I think that is something that will definitely need to be addressed.
I would say, as an improvement to the bill, that there are ways of carving out the manufacturing and transfer of substances that are covered under the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act. That would really take care of this whole area where what it is going to go wrong or what the impacts would be cannot be defined exactly. If exemptions could exist if there was a harm related to the manufacture or transfer of substances covered under the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, that might be a reasonable amendment to see.
Hopefully, when this bill gets looked at, people will weigh the balance of things and try to come to a place where we are protecting workers' right to collective bargaining, but I think we need to make sure that we are protecting society and the public from undue harm. The supply chain issue is a real and present danger, with the number of disruptions that we have had. We already lack capacity at our ports. We are lacking rail connectivity in this country. It is not getting better; it is getting worse. With all of those kinds of disruptions, we need to find a way to incorporate “essential worker” and “essential service” as part of this legislation.
Hopefully, at the end of the day, what we would find is that people are bargaining in good faith and bargaining faster. If they do not bargain in good faith, then before they are in a strike position it goes to binding arbitration, which will come to a resolution that maybe neither party will be satisfied with but at least will not have an impact on families, Canadians, businesses and our export partners.
I look forward to the debate and listening to the ideas my colleagues have. I am from a union family. I support union workers. I support the rights of people to collectively bargain. I have been on the other side and can say that it is no fun crossing a picket line.
With that, I look forward to the comments and questions from my colleagues.
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- Feb/26/24 3:56:13 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is clear that the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley is passionate about the legislation. He talked about how he was able to talk his coalition partners, the Liberals, into it, but I am interested to know why the Liberals did not include in the scope of the bill the federal PSAC workers. There were 120,000 of them who went on strike, and one would think that if the Liberals thought it was such a terrific idea, they would want to extend the bill to cover not replacing those workers.
Does the member have any thoughts on that?
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- Feb/26/24 1:50:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on the same point of order.
It was the current government that put into place the virtual application and voted with the NDP to keep it. Is it trying to create two classes of citizens, those who voted electronically and those who voted in person? I do not think that is appropriate; both are valid and we should not be calling out the difference.
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- Feb/26/24 1:37:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader said that we have a minority government, but that is not true. We have a majority government since the NDP and the Liberals got hitched.
The Liberals keep trying to change the rules in the House. This is not the first time. They tried to do it in 2015, at the time of the infamous “elbowgate” incident. Now they are trying again.
I think that the government wants total control. What does the member think?
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- Feb/15/24 12:21:00 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I acknowledge the member's work with his palliative care motion, which led to my bringing the palliative care bill to Parliament. He may be aware that the five-year review shows an increase in people who have accessed palliative care from 30% to 58%. There is still a long way to go.
My question for the member has to do with the Truchon decision, which he talked about. I agree that it should have been appealed to the Supreme Court, but the government today can still ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on it. I think that is what the government should do. Does the member agree?
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- Feb/14/24 2:10:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the Liberal-NDP government, Canadians know that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. In this era of insane inflation, housing crisis and food prices that are through the roof, the Prime Minister is hiking the carbon tax again on April 1. The Liberals want to quadruple it to 61¢ a litre. Canadians are crying out for relief, but the government instead wants to keep digging deeper into our pockets to fund its corrupt overspending. The carbon tax makes food more expensive at every stage. When one taxes the farmer who grows the food and the trucker who transports the food, one taxes the people who buy the food.
The carbon tax does nothing to reduce emissions but forces Canadians into poverty and homelessness. The end result of the Liberals' failed carbon tax experiment is the two million Canadians who are now using food banks. This is unacceptable.
Conservatives will continue to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
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Madam Speaker, here we are again at the eleventh hour. The government has waited on something that it has to put in place; otherwise, on March 17, people whose only condition is a mental illness will be able to apply for medical assistance in dying.
The Liberals are not virgins in the parliamentary process. They understand very well that, typically, for a bill to go through three readings in the House and through committee meetings, and then go to the red chamber, where a similar number of readings and committee meetings take place, takes about 18 months. If there is goodwill among all parties and we agree, it may be six months. It is ludicrous to me that less than two months before the deadline, the government put forward this legislation. It is really putting a gun to the head of opposition members, because if we decide not to pass the bill, on March 17 people who suffer only from a mental illness will be able to receive medical assistance in dying.
I have a lot of compassion for people suffering from mental illness. In many cases, they have suicidal thoughts and are not full of hope for the future, so it is easy for them to say in despair that there is no way out. However, a lot of people get better and go on to live full lives. They are not in a place where they can really take that decision.
It is not the first time the government has waited until the last minute. I remember when the medical assistance in dying legislation in Bill C-14 was introduced, there was a lot of pressure for us to get along and pass the bill. I would have more confidence if it were not for the fact that the government continually brings forward legislation that is unconstitutional. Then it goes through the courts to the Supreme Court and, like Bill C-69, is declared unconstitutional. The bill for the welfare of indigenous children was also declared unconstitutional. It is our job to give due process to bills and to make sure they are a good idea, rather than just rubber-stamping them and passing them along.
I do not want to have the consequence that people who are mentally ill would receive MAID if we do not pass this legislation in time, but we have no guarantee that the Senate is not going to delay the bill. There was a question for the member who gave the last speech about how the Senate may choose to block the bill. That would delay it even further and we would not make the timeline. It is not a sure thing that the bill is going to get across the line.
We have to look back to the Carter decision. We spent a lot of time talking about what the response would be, and it was the court's order that the criteria be an irremediable condition with imminent death. That is the path we started on. I was very concerned at the time because every recommendation from the special committee that studied this said that without good-quality palliative care, one really does not have a choice.
At that point in time, I found out that only 30% of Canadians had access to palliative care. That is what prompted me to bring forward my private member's bill to get consistent access to palliative care for all Canadians. That bill unanimously passed in the House. Since then, we have doubled access, from 30% to almost 60%, which is a great thing, but there is more to go. If people do not have good-quality palliative care, they really do not have a real choice.
The government needs to refocus itself. I saw in the report that after five years of progress on palliative care, there are still identified gaps. The government needs to pursue that with passion and aggressiveness because that is the answer. If people have good-quality palliative care, they do not choose medical assistance in dying, and that applies everywhere. I met today with some of the representatives from palliative care, and they informed me that when people go to hospice, nine out of 10 of them are asking for medical assistance in dying, but very few of them actually take advantage of it once they experience palliative care.
Why are nine out of 10 of them asking for medical assistance in dying? It is because the doctors are recommending it, and I do not have any confidence that the safeguards that were supposed to be in place are actually being adhered to. A doctor from the Liberal Party who spoke before me cited five examples that he is aware of where clearly people did not meet the conditions but were given medical assistance in dying.
Canada is on a very slippery slope. If we look at the history of countries that have implemented medical assistance in dying, the Netherlands was sort of at the forefront, and it took a while for it to experience a rise in the percentage of people who were dying from medical assistance in dying. However, last year in Canada, 4% of people who died did so by medical assistance in dying. We set a world record. We are top of the charts on killing people with medical assistance in dying.
I think this is absolutely the wrong direction, so to broaden medical assistance in dying to include people who are mentally ill is absolutely ill-informed, at the very least. I would say, without being insensitive, that people who are mentally ill are actually able to kill themselves. Sadly, in their despair, many of them are taking their lives every day. They do not need the government to enable them.
The Conservatives warned the government, when this ill-advised amendment came from the Senate, that this would happen. Instead of realizing the mistake and backing off, the Liberal government is kicking the can down the road for another three years, where the next government will deal with it, instead of recognizing that this is not a good idea.
Doctors are saying that 50% of the time they cannot even identify whether somebody's condition, when they suffer from mental illness, is irremediable. If that is the case, then half of the time, they are going to kill someone who might have gotten better. This is a totally bad idea. The government should stand up, say it realizes the mistake it has made and that it should have introduced legislation to eliminate that mistake. However, that is not where we are today. Today, here we are: If we do not make a decision and pass the bill in a hurry, people with mental illness are going to start dying from MAID on March 17.
I would say that there is a lot scope creep that has been suggested. Where do we stop? There has been a suggestion that if we approve those with mental illness, maybe minors should be added, or maybe the option of advance directive should be added. It looks like the solution to all of these things is death. We hear that homeless people are requesting medical assistance in dying. We hear that veterans are being advised to take medical assistance in dying. This is just scope creep and broadening who is dying in this way, without having proper controls in place. I do not think that is acceptable.
One of the things that has been totally ignored is the conscience rights of doctors. The federal government will always say it did not preclude that in its bill, but the fact is that provinces are forcing medical doctors and nurses to participate, even if it is against their religion and their conscience rights, and the federal government has done nothing to correct that situation. That is a problem.
The other thing I would say is that in the creep that is happening, they have created an express lane for the disabled. It is disgusting to the disabled community and disgusting to me that they would say that if someone is disabled, they should go to the front of the line. For the vulnerable, the mentally ill and the disabled, we need to protect those people; we need to stand up for their rights and know that we can give them hope.
I do not agree with the way this was brought forward. I think the government should have appealed the Truchon decision. When Quebec decided this needed to happen, the government should have said no, that it had thought about it, studied it and spent a long time on it. It should have said it was going to appeal that decision, because what it brought in at the beginning was at least better than the scope creep we are seeing now.
I have talked about the many examples of things that are not good with the legislation. Obviously, I do not want to see anymore people die. I will definitely work with the government to see the legislation pass as speedily as possible, and I encourage it to use the same leverage it used on Bill C-234 to help its Liberal-appointed senators do what it wants. I hope it does the same on this bill and that it receives speedy passage, and that we do not have people with mental illness being killed by the government.
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- Feb/13/24 2:54:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians have been forced to pay through the nose for everything after eight years of the Liberal-NDP government. Not only did the government give contractors $20 million for doing no work on the arrive scam app, but the Auditor General also said that the $80,000 app cost over $60 million of taxpayer money. Now the government is increasing the carbon tax on April 1.
Why should Canadians have to foot the bill for the government's corrupt overspending?
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- Feb/13/24 2:53:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister wasted more than $60 million on his ArriveCAN scam app, and he is going to make Canadians pay more by quadrupling the carbon tax. It is going up 23% on April 1. After eight years of the Liberal-NDP government, it is no surprise, but this Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
Why do Canadians have to foot the bill for the government's corrupt spending?
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- Feb/12/24 5:05:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader is right. I agree the children are the future, and it warms my heart to hear the children of Aamjiwnaang singing O Canada at the Remembrance Day ceremonies in Sarnia—Lambton.
However, I think we need more. We need more action. There has been very slow progress on the 92 truth and reconciliation recommendations, and slow progress on the murdered and missing aboriginal women recommendations. How would this council, outside of the government, do anything to press the government to accelerate its efforts in reconciliation?
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- Feb/12/24 3:19:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I move that December be Christian heritage month.
Some hon. members: No.
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- Feb/8/24 5:55:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we request a recorded division.
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- Feb/8/24 1:21:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member opposite mentioned in her speech that we need nurses and construction workers, and I agree. We are short 100,000 construction workers in Ontario alone, and many thousands of nurses. The Minister of Immigration just made an arbitrary decision to cut, by 50% in Ontario, colleges, which produce nurses, construction workers and those kinds of things.
Would the member commit to take this back to her caucus to try and get exemptions for colleges that are providing housing and adequate support, and producing the nurses and construction workers we need?
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- Feb/8/24 1:07:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am very concerned about the length of time it takes for every kind of immigration permit, whether it is a permanent resident card or a permanent work visa after someone has been a student. It is literally taking years, and the department has increased in size by 50%.
Can the member tell us what exactly the Liberal government will do to bring down wait times?
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- Feb/8/24 12:53:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I heard someone say today that there is a shortage of services for French language training in Montreal, in the riding of the member who gave her speech. What can the government do to increase services?
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- Feb/8/24 12:37:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Bloc Québécois talked about problems with the current immigration system. Here is my question. What would the Bloc Québécois's plan be if Quebec were responsible for immigration?
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- Feb/8/24 11:56:16 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague has outlined some of the failures of the Liberal government in terms of huge backlogs in almost every area.
I think it is important to point out, as well, the types of people who are being allowed in. We are talking about needing to build homes, but the numbers of construction workers are low. Meanwhile, there is an open door at Pearson airport, where people can just show up and claim refugee status.
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- Feb/8/24 11:21:55 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, my question for the minister has to do with the recent announcement about cutting the number of foreign students in Ontario by 50%.
Lambton College, in my riding, depends on those foreign students to keep tuition low. It produces nurses, personal support workers and paramedics. With the aging population, we need those workers. However, the minister decided that master's and Ph.D students could stay, while all the rest of these colleges would be cut. Lambton College built student housing, and it is building more student housing that will be there by the time the caps come into play.
Will the minister either allow exemptions for colleges that are not part of the issue or revisit the decision that was made and maybe focus on eliminating the fake colleges in strip malls that exist?
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- Feb/8/24 10:53:59 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the leader of the Bloc for his fine speech. It is clear that the Liberal government has broken the immigration system. We absolutely need a plan for health care and affordable housing, but I have not seen a plan from the government.
The Standing Committee on Official Languages studied immigration. We need many immigrants who speak French. However, once again, this government has no plan.
What does the leader of the Bloc want to see in the plan for Quebec?
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