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Decentralized Democracy

Member of Parliament

Marilyn Gladu

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of Parliament
  • Conservative
  • Sarnia—Lambton
  • Ontario
  • Voting Attendance: 68%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $118,419.33

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 285 - Feb/26/24
Ms. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC)
  • Feb/26/24 4:00:01 p.m.
  • Watch
  • Re: Bill C-58 
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.
1437 words
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