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Context: House Hansard - 296 - Apr/9/24

Apr/11/24 12:56:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, certainly what we have seen from the Conservatives is part of the pattern of toxic disinformation. The only way one can get away with standing up in the House and making ridiculous claims about some kind of international globalist conspiracy that will kill 170,000, 190,000 or millions of jobs is if they try to shut down the facts. We saw at our committee that every time workers came to speak, the Conservatives shut them down. They shut down the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, whose members work in the oil patch. They shut down the carpenters union, whose members work on so many of the building projects. They shut down the Canadian Labour Congress. They shut down Unifor, which represents workers in the EV plants. They shut down the Alberta Federation of Labour. What is it about the Conservatives that they are so angry and are ensuring that the workers who brought the bill forward are not allowed to speak, so the Conservatives can get their disinformation sock puppets to spread falsehoods? Why is it so important that we actually have the voice of labour at the table when we are talking about the transition that is under way?

203 words

Apr/9/24 1:18:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, when we had energy workers come talk to Parliament about being part of a new energy economy and the need to have their voices at the table, the Conservatives shut them down. They shut down the IBEW. They shut down the construction workers. They shut down the building trades. They shut down the Canadian Labour Congress and the Alberta Federation of Labour. They would not let them speak. When it came to coal workers who had been hurt in the transition, it was New Democrats who brought in the coal workers, because the Conservatives were not interested in letting working people speak. Given the evidence that we heard from energy workers in Alberta, who understood that there is a new future out there, why did the Conservatives shut them down time and time again and not let workers from the energy community speak?

145 words

Dec/14/23 4:39:39 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, one of the fascinating things, since the member for Carleton took over, is the use of the Trojan horse approach. The Conservatives say they want to deal with all the stuff that is in the budget and keep us here until Christmas, but it was a way for them to be visibly on the record as voting against Ukraine. They managed to do that. What they have been doing with this bill on anti-scab legislation is carrying on their constant attack on investment in EV technology. We see the Conservatives of the 401 corridor making fun of EV batteries, saying they are going to catch fire, that they are inefficient, that we should just give the money out, as though we give it out to everybody. Volkswagen is making a $7-billion investment in Canada. That is enormous. There will be $5 billion from Stellantis, and GM is going to spend $35 billion on EV technology. The Conservatives are claiming that the people who are brought over to help set up the plant are scab labour. The Conservatives do not misunderstand the bill. They are abusing this bill to drive the agenda of the Conservative leader, the member who lives in Stornoway, who has undermined the EV investments that Canadians are dependent upon.

216 words

Labour
Ev

Dec/14/23 4:30:44 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the workers who will be brought in to set up the battery plant are not scab labour. They are not replacement workers. The member needs to understand—

30 words

Dec/14/23 1:21:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, history is important. It tells us how we got here, and I certainly we remember Stephen Harper and his continual attack on workers. What worries me today is that, when we see investments such as those in the Stellantis plant, the Conservatives are always speaking up about it as though it is scab labour. Investments at Stellantis are not scab labour. We need to invest in a new battery economy or it is all going stateside to the United States. If we do not invest in this new economy, we are going to be left behind, so I am always shocked the Conservatives are undermining the new EV technology, which is going to have a big transformative effect, and the Conservatives are using it in speeches on scab labour. Someone is going to have to give them some basic lessons in labour.

144 words

Dec/14/23 1:20:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to wish my colleague and his family a very merry Christmas. He does ask a legitimate question. How can we trust the Liberals? I do not know how many times, on anti-scab legislation, it has been like Lucy and the football. The Liberals would come out and tell everybody in the labour movement to not worry and that they had their backs, and then my God, as soon as the vote came, they would all sneak out by the backbench and leave. That is a really important question. How can we trust Liberals? We cannot, but the great thing is that, as we are in a minority government, they are going to have to work with us if they want to keep their jobs, so we got dental care. I know the Conservatives do not want dental care, but we got that. We got anti-scab. We are going to get pharmacare. It is a good point that one cannot turn one's back on them for a minute. If one falls asleep in the boat with the Liberals, one will be waking up swimming with the fishes. However, we are going to hold them to account.

202 words

Dec/14/23 1:09:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not surprised that they are trying to shut down a discussion on labour rights. We know the deep, anti-labour history of the Conservatives. If they do not want to know history, they can go have a walk around the block. We know that the modern middle class was formed in Canada in 1945 at the Ford Windsor strike. That was a follow-up to what happened in 1938 in Flint, Michigan. What happened in Flint, Michigan, matters to Canada. Conservatives do not understand that, but it matters because it was the piece of Detroit that established the post-war consensus of labour, capital and government that started the biggest transformation of wealth and success in the history of the world. The movement of the working class from precarious crap jobs to stable housing, proper wages and pensions, came out of out those strikes. In my region in 1941, the Kirkland Lake gold miners' strike was a brutal strike that won the right to collective bargaining. In 1973, it was the steelworkers going on strike again and again, and the wildcat strikes. Those were illegal strikes in Elliot Lake that forced fundamental changes to the workers' compensation acts everywhere. Health and safety became a fundamental issue because workers were dying on the job and they were not going to take it anymore. This is our history. This is the history of New Democrats. This is the history of my family. The other history is a dark history and it begins in 1980 when we saw the planned destruction of the modern working class, middle class that was put in place by the gurus of the Conservative movement, like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Friedrich Hayek was so opposed to the growth of wealth of the North American working class that he wrote an essay calling for a planned depression. He wanted to force a depression on North America in order to break the backs of the working class. That was picked up by Ronald Reagan. That was picked up by Paul Volcker of the Federal Reserve. It began in January 1980 with massive increases in interest rates that led to millions of jobs lost across the United States, and that spilled over into Canada. What we saw then was that Ronald Reagan targeted the union movement and from then on, we started to see the loss of rights of workers, the loss of wages and the loss of security. In Canada, that effort was undertaken, but thankfully, we had the solid backing of some very strong labour leaders. At the time, Bob White and United Auto Workers, before it became Canadian Auto Workers, came out with a no-concessions policy. Under no circumstances were they going to give concessions. They stood up to Chrysler. They stood up to GM. They stood up at factory after factory to defend the rights of workers. We know that modern Conservatives would not support that. Bill Davis, who was an old-style Conservative, actually sided on a number of occasions, with the auto workers along the 401 belt to say that they did have rights, even at a time of massive job losses. We saw the damage that was done from the 1980s on. We can count it in the lost wages and lost security. The neo-liberal attack on worker rights was so overwhelming. Let us talk about the RAND Corporation. Under the present Conservative leader, one might think the RAND Corporation is a rabid lefty, but it actually usually works for the U.S. military. The RAND Corporation did a study of economic inequality to deal with the issue of democratic instability in the United States. Certainly, we have seen what is happening with MAGA, and the issue of economic precarity, the loss of the North American working class, and the creation of economic instability and political instability. From the period around 1980, when the attack on organized labour in the United States began, to what followed in Canada, we have, in the United States today, a Black worker making $26,000 less than they would if the 1980 wages remained constant. A college-educated worker is earning between $48,000 and $63,000 less a year. All that wealth, according to the RAND Corporation, was plundered directly for the benefit of the 1%. What we are seeing is that it identified the loss of wages, pension security and benefits to be in the order of $50 trillion of lost money that belonged to the working and middle class. It was then was hoovered up and put in the pockets of the 1%. That is what created the political and economic instability of our age. In the United States, that loss of income means that for every worker, it lost $1,114 a month, for every single month for the last 40 years. That is what created MAGA. Although we hear the Conservatives talking about inflation and how hard it is, we have seen no efforts by the Conservatives, ever, to stand with workers, ever to stand up on these issues, but this is the issue that has to be dealt with. This is why workers came to us again and again, to talk about anti-scab legislation so that we could restore the balance of negotiations with labour and management, the right of workers to have a seat at the table. I want to quote Paul Mason from his book, Postcapitalism. This is a really instructive statement that: the destruction of labour's bargaining power - was the essence of the entire [right-wing] project; it was a means to all the other ends. Neoliberalism’s guiding principle is not free markets, nor fiscal discipline, nor sound money, nor privatization and offshoring – not even globalization. All these things were byproducts or weapons of its main endeavour: to remove organized labour from the equation. That was the whole Milton Friedman, Stephen Harper, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan agenda for the last 40 years. Guess what? Those days are over, because what we have seen in this past year is unprecedented victory for workers' rights. Remember, just a few years ago, Bill Morneau, the privatized pension king in Canada, “bill no more”, told young workers to get used to it and that they should suck it up as precarious, crappy, gig jobs are the new normal. That was the new normal for Bill Morneau. Then what happened? We got COVID. We had to break up supply chains and we had a young generation of workers who said they were not going to put up with crappy work. They started to walk off the job, to refuse to take the job or to organize. In this past year, the UAW, in their strikes against the big three, ended the tiered wages that were forced on them in the eighties and the nineties. Unifor won the biggest wage increase in their history of negotiations with Ford. When the Hollywood writers went on strike, everyone they thought they would cave. They did not. They won three times the original offer that was put on the table. We are seeing young people organizing at Tesla, Amazon and Starbucks. They know they cannot count on right-wing governments to protect their interests. They are going to organize; they have a right to be at the table. The worst thing that we can do is to allow scab labour to come into our workplaces to try and undermine their rights to restore balance and to have proper wages, proper pensions and proper housing. That is going to be fought by organized labour. This bill has to pass. We support it as New Democrats.

1291 words

Context: House Hansard - 261 - Dec/4/23

Dec/14/23 1:06:52 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-58

Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in the House. I am certainly very proud to rise on Bill C-58, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code and the Canada Industrial Relations Board Regulations, to end the practice in federally regulated workplaces of being able to bring in scab labour. This is something that New Democrats and the labour movement have fought many years for, and we are determined to make this a reality. At the outset, I want to thank the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay who spoke about the history, because history is important. He mentioned the history of the Rossland miners and the Western Federation of Miners, and the transformation they brought across this country. I am proud to be from Cobalt where the 17th district of the Western Federation of Miners was formed under Big Jim McGuire. The fact that the fight for the eight-hour day began in the mines of Cobalt on April 28, the international day of mourning for workers killed on the job, relates directly to the Cobalt Miners Union winning the right to workers' compensation in 1914. My grandfather, Charlie Angus, died at the Hollinger Mine, and my other grandfather, Joe MacNeil, broke his back underground at the McIntyre Mine. Both were members of Mine Mill and then the Steelworkers. When I was growing up, anybody who came from a mining town had a relative who had been injured or killed on the job. However, organized labour fundamentally changed that. The right of labour to organize, the right of labour to fight for a better future, is the history of our country and of the United States. They talk about the birth of the middle class in the United States as being the 1938 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan where the auto workers were not going to put up with precarious work—

319 words

Context: House Hansard - 260 - Dec/1/23

Dec/4/23 4:14:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have had over 133 witnesses and 120 hours of hearings on the issue of the energy transition. The Conservatives had nothing to say to any energy worker. When we brought the Canadian Labour Congress, the Conservatives shut them down. When the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers came, the Conservatives shut them down. When the carpenters union came to speak, they shut them down. When the International Trade Union Confederation came, they shut them down. When the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs came, they shut them down. It was New Democrats who brought representatives from the coal transition. The Conservatives had no interest at all in hearing from workers. This legislation is about workers having a seat at the table, and the Conservatives have turned to gong-show gibberish politics to stop workers from having a seat at the table. I want to ask my hon. colleague why he thinks the Conservatives have fallen down the rabbit hole of conspiracy in their attempts to stop workers from having a seat in a discussion about their future.

179 words

Context: House Hansard - 228 - Oct/3/23

Dec/1/23 10:36:49 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, over the last year, with respect to issues regarding the energy transition that is happening, we heard from 130 witnesses over 120 hours of hearings. There have been 45,000 job losses in the oil patch, with 1,500 this year and many more coming. When workers came to talk about the right that they should have to be at the table, the Conservatives shut them down every single time. They shut down Unifor, the Canadian Labour Congress, the IBEW and the Carpenters Union. When we brought the coal workers, who have experience in the transition that happened in Alberta, there was not a single question from any Alberta member, yet they sat there and bragged about their muscle cars from the 1970s; let us talk about entitlement and boomer disconnect. As our planet is burning and our workers have been begging for and demanding a right to sit at the table, the Conservatives are playing these games. What has it been like for my colleague to have to watch such toxic, juvenile, immature behaviour undermining the right of workers to be heard in the energy transition that is happening?

192 words

Context: House Hansard - 188 - May/1/23

Oct/3/23 5:15:04 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-56

Madam Speaker, I am very proud to rise and speak to Bill C-56, technically an act to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Competition Act. We need to frame the situation that Canada is in right now as a time when the chickens have really come home to roost after years of economic policies of the Conservatives and the Liberals. They told us that our cities would be better off if we let the market and global capital decide the value of our neighbourhoods and gave up the security that we had with union jobs and defined pension plans, if we turned our nation over to the Morneau Shepells of the world to decide what kinds of benefits we should have after a lifetime of working. We see the results. When I go into stores in my region, people in their seventies, who used to be retired, are now working at places such as Tim Hortons, because they cannot afford to retire. I see the results when talking to men in my region who are 68 or 69 years old, who went back to work underground on the drills because they could not pay their housing costs. Working on the drills is hard for a young man, but 70-year-olds are going back underground because they cannot afford to pay these costs. Another man I knew said he had to go back underground at 70 because he could not pay for his wife's medicine. We have a government that has talked about pharmacare since my hair was dark and long before that, and yet it still has not delivered. Of course, the Conservatives do not believe in pharmacare, just as they do not believe in the public programs that we and our parents built up over generations, which have been stripped away steadily under the belief in the free market, that we had free market in labour so that people were on precarious gig work. That was Bill Morneau. Members will remember when he told a young generation to get used to it; this would be their new normal. Of course, COVID blew all that away. Young people are saying that this is not going to be their normal, and they have started walking away from these jobs. We see the situation where people cannot afford to buy their groceries because of the relentless price gouging of the likes of Galen Weston. We will never hear the Conservatives stand up to a CEO. For example, the other day, they were telling us that the price of potatoes in Calgary had gone up 70% because of the carbon tax. Calgary does not get its potatoes from P.E.I. It gets them from Idaho, which does not pay a carbon tax. In Idaho, the reason the price of potatoes went up is because of the climate crisis that is ongoing in the west. This is something the Conservatives will never admit, even in a year where we have lost 14 million hectares of forest lands and where over 200,000 people were forced to be evacuated in Canada, with billions in costs. That is what we get from the Conservatives. The Liberals talk about it, but emissions continue to go up. The Liberals say they are going to sit down and meet with the CEOs of the grocery chains; hopefully, they will do something. Nobody believes them. We need stronger commitments. I do not know how many announcements and reannouncements I have heard in eight years from the Liberals about their commitment to housing, yet I still do not see those houses being built. We need to take this issue seriously because of the price gouging that has gone on, the market exploitation and the turning of our cities over to Airbnb, which allowed young people and working-class people to be forced out of the cities they love. In my region, the housing and homelessness issue is at a crisis level. We never saw Doug Ford offer to build any houses in Timmins. He was willing to sell off the greenbelt, but we could use those houses. This is the situation we are in, so people are frustrated. They deserve a straight vision. They deserve a commitment. How would that commitment look? Certainly, in terms of housing, we know that the market-driven solutions have driven us into this crisis. We know that what worked before, until the 1990s, when Paul Martin walked away on it, was the federal investment with the provinces and municipalities to build housing. The best solution is co-operative public housing that has mixed-income housing. That is what we need. I need to be able to go back to my communities with a commitment that these houses are going to be built. There is not a quicker driver to build an economy than housing. We could do that today if there was will in this House to do that. We need to get serious with the CEOs. We have talked about a windfall tax, but we need to actually make them deliver, or we have to start talking about issues like price controls. We know that people are being gouged, and we are in a situation where we cannot allow the oligopoly of grocery chains, because there is no competition, to call the shots, as they are doing. We need to limit their ability to continue to spread their powers as we see Shoppers Drug Mart moving more and more into health care. We simply cannot trust them. We need to protect the public health care system. These are all the issues that are coming toward us at this time. I mentioned it quickly, but I want to actually really focus on how we are also in the middle of a climate catastrophe. We need to talk about the climate catastrophe. We have the leader of the Conservative Party, the member who lives in Stornoway, a 19-room mansion with his own personal chef, who would make burning fossil fuel free. We are at an absolute crisis on our planet. We are also at a time when the International Energy Agency said, as of last week, that the end of big oil is imminent because of the incredible investments that have been made all around the world, but not in Canada, on clean energy. There is no place in the world that has more potential for clean energy right now than in the province of Alberta, yet Danielle Smith shut down $33 billion of clean energy projects and rented a truck to drive around Ottawa, telling us that the power is going out in Alberta. Most premiers spend money to attract investment or to say their province is an energy superpower. Is that not what Alberta said? They said they were a province that could build energy projects and get them off the ground. Instead, she is paying for the gas to go around saying they cannot keep the power on in Alberta. That is the Conservative vision. They are wedded to big oil, an industry that has made billions in the last few years while we got gouged at the pumps. We will never hear the Conservatives talk about the price gouging that we know is happening. When we go home on a Friday in northern Ontario, we know the price goes up right across the board on those long weekends at the same time; everybody knows it is price gouging, but the Conservatives say they will get rid of the carbon tax and make it free to burn. I can ask anyone if they think big oil is not going to, if that tax came up, just hoover that up and put it into the profits of people like Rich Kruger. We are at a time when Canadians are looking to Parliament to actually deliver. In the last election I went door to door talking to people about their concerns. I heard, again and again, that people could not afford to get their teeth fixed. People said they do not trust politicians anymore. They asked how they could get their kids' teeth fixed. I said that if they elected us, we would go back and get a national dental care plan. We are going to get that plan. The Conservatives announced they would spend all summer going around to try to stop that budget implementation, but we are going to get dental care for seniors and children this year. The other commitment we made, and I am putting the Liberals on notice, is that we made that commitment to pharmacare. We have two more years in this Parliament. If we do not see pharmacare, it is going to be pretty hard to go back and say that we hung out with the son of PIerre Elliott for two or three years. People ask why we are hanging out with that guy. We are hanging out here on this side to get something done. That is pharmacare and dental care. If we go back to the Canadian people and say we did that, it shows them how Parliament can work and that we can work across party lines. We intend to make sure we can go back to the Canadian people who said that in a time of crisis, New Democrats were there on the issues that mattered to people. We will stand up and fight for people who cannot afford to pay CEBA back, when the government only gives them an extra 18 days. We will fight for small businesses. We will fight for a cleaner climate. We will fight for the indigenous communities that continue to be ignored. We will fight for pharmacare, and we will fight for dental care. That is why we were elected and that is why we are here today.

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Context: House Hansard - 170 - Mar/21/23

May/1/23 5:18:00 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-47

Madam Speaker, after the 2021 election, we got a clear message from Canadians. They wanted us to come back and actually make this Parliament work and not just stand in the corner, light our hair on fire, jump up and down, and scream. I wanted to focus on the climate crisis through the need to invest in well-paying jobs to build a clean-energy economy. We spent the last year negotiating with the Minister of Natural Resources and the Minister of Labour. I want to ask my hon. colleague about the importance of finally getting the tax credit incentives that are tied to well-paying union jobs and apprenticeships. We have $85 billion to kick-start a clean-tech economy, a revolution that Calgary Economic Development says will create 170,000 jobs in Alberta alone. Why do the Conservatives continue to oppose anything that has to do with a clean-tech economy?

153 words

Context: House Hansard - 170 - Mar/21/23

Mar/21/23 11:30:17 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to rise in the House. I will be sharing my time with the member for Windsor West. The fact that we have to discuss, in 2023, the need to stop slave labour products from entering Canada is a very telling indicator of where we are in the world right now. Of course, the focus of the Conservatives is the horrific treatment of the Uighurs in China, but we need to broaden this to look at the global race to the bottom that has led to such massive exploitation of environment, indigenous people and the rights of working people around the world. What we are talking about is the dark side of globalization. Five years ago it would have been heresy to question the great myth of globalization, but that was before COVID and the fact that the supply chains were not able to withstand it, that we could not provide our frontline medical workers with proper PPE because we did not have the factory capacity. This was due to the fact that we had offshored all these basic things that a country needed to keep itself safe to the lowest common denominators and to the sweatshops in the global south. Before, with globalization, we were told that it would lift all boats. It certainly lifted some boats. It lifted the superyachts, but it was always about freeing the power of capital to live and move wherever it wanted without obligation, the environmental or legal obligations in the jurisdictions they worked within. In fact, globalization was about limiting the power of countries and regions to protect their interests. We know what happened when Mexico tried to stop toxic chemicals. It was targeted because that was supposedly unfair to trade. We are now at a point where the global supply chain is using slave labour. This is not some dark, obscure fact. All one has to do is go to any shopping mall and into any of the big stores. We know the companies that have been named as being complicit in slave labour, companies such as Adidas, Carter's, Gap, General Motors, Google, Bosch, Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch, Dell. Those are just a few of the 83 that have been identified. Those corporations have their products in all our stores. I find it interesting that the Conservative focus is that we should try to work with our international allies to deal with this somehow, as opposed to saying to these companies that if they deal with slave labour, they get charged, end of story. What we see here, again, is this myth of the race to the bottom, that somehow people are surprised that we would end up with slave labour. I go back to the free trade debate with Brian Mulroney. In that original free trade debate, it was argued that if we merged our environmental and labour standards with the United States, we would all be better off. Of course, we saw a huge bleed-off of manufacturing jobs. At least with the United States, we were dealing with comparable economies. However, it was Clinton and Mulroney's decision to extend it to Mexico that was the real indicator, because Mexico had much lower wage standards. It did not have the protection of laws that Canadian and American workers had. Once the free trade agreement was set with Mexico, we saw the setting up of the maquiladora sections, where these companies just moved across the border and were protected under Mexican law from all kinds of obligations to pay proper wages, to pay even properly into the Mexican system. It was the race to the bottom. Our country signed on right then, and 766,000 U.S. jobs moved over the border into Mexico, to low-wage maquiladora plants. It is interesting that those plants were also locations where horrific numbers of young women were being found murdered and sexually mutilated. If we are creating disposable products, we somehow are creating disposable people. We have never actually dealt with that. From the model that they had with the maquiladora section set up in Mexico was the idea to offshore to the global south. Remember Jean Chrétien and the great China initiative? It was not that we were going to be able to sell our furniture into the world's biggest market. This was about capital being able to offshore its jobs. The company known at that time for the biggest drive of going to American and Canadian corporations and saying that they could make more money by shutting down their operations and shifting that work over to places like India or China was McKinsey; McKinsey that is now getting $100 million in contracts from the federal government; McKinsey being the company that has been called the single biggest factor in the destruction of the American working and middle class. What we saw in the move to shift work to low-wage jurisdictions without legal accountability or legal standards was the race to the bottom, and it became more severe as economic precarity grew in North America. We ended up with a situation like, for example, Joe Fresh. I spoke about it earlier today. Joe Fresh and Loblaws were selling cheap clothing. People could pay $2 for shirts for their kids. These were being made in sweatshops in Bangladesh in horrific conditions. A collapse of one of these sweatshop factories killed 1,135 human beings. Those human beings died because of corporate negligence. Another 2,500 people were injured. There was no accountability for Loblaws, which makes record profits, or for Joe Fresh. They paid $150 per person and walked away. That is astounding. We know the story of Apple, the very cool iPhone company, and of its people working in sweatshops in China. Workers were so mistreated that they started to kill themselves in such numbers that the contractor put nets out to try to catch them from jumping. That is a degrading, despicable race to the bottom, yet there was no accountability. Apple remained the cool company. In fact, speaking of Apple, if people have its phone, when they pick the phone up, they are picking up at least a ton of rock. That is what it takes to make a phone. That ton of rock is coming out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is coming out of the slave labour conditions in the Congo. Our supply chains have not even addressed that. We need to start talking about the corporate accountability and responsibility for allowing this race to the bottom to happen. What has it meant for the jobs that used to be here? I will quote from the RAND Corporation, not exactly a left-wing think tank. It has worked for the U.S. military for the last half century or much longer. RAND looked at the growth of inequality in the United States and it identified, from the 1980s, that $50 trillion from the savings and wages of the working and middle class was transferred to the upper class, the 1%. RAND says that this is the equivalent of $1,144 for every worker for every month for four decades. That is what created the growing political inequality in the United States, the growing uncertainty and the anger out there. We have to address in the House accountability for what happened that allowed globalization to shift responsibility, to shift work to brutal, underfunded conditions where people are exploited, while undermining the middle and working class in North America. To do that, we need corporate accountability. If subcontractors commit crimes against people in the Global South, they need to be held accountable for it. If they are using slave labour and selling those items in malls, they need to be held accountable for it. Canadians expect that. They also expect that corporations are going to be held accountable for this offshoring of work to sweatshops, the slave labour conditions and the brutality that we have seen over the last few decades. The time has come where we have to start to shift back to corporate responsibility, environmental responsibility and fair labour standards.

1371 words

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Context: House Hansard - 170 - Mar/21/23

Mar/21/23 10:32:08 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, if one wants to deal with slave labour products, all one has to do is walk through any shopping mall. It has been identified that 83 major brands are tied to slave labour, like Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Carter's, The Gap, Bosch, Calvin Klein, General Motors, Google and Dell. We have seen the reports. We know where these corporations are. Is it about working with our allies or simply saying, in Canadian law, that if a corporation is selling products in Canada from slave labour, it will be held accountable? I imagine that if we actually put laws in place to deal with that, the companies would up their standards. Right now, they are getting a free pass and it is not acceptable.

126 words

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Context: House Hansard - 154 - Feb/6/23

Mar/21/23 10:17:10 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the question of the use of forced labour in our supply chains is a very important question, and I am glad we are debating it, but it also raises the question of the huge level of exploitation we have seen through the myth that globalization could lead a race to the bottom and we would all be better off. I would refer my colleague to the Joe Fresh brand, the cheap clothing sold by Loblaws. When a building collapsed, killing over 1,000 people in those sweatshops in Bangladesh, Loblaws paid out the equivalent of 150 bucks per person killed due to the negligence, yet when workers attempted to get their rights heard in a Canadian court, Loblaws and Joe Fresh walked free. They were not responsible for what was happening because they had outsourced this misery to a third world jurisdiction. We have to have standards in Canada. We have a right to ensure that what we buy is sourced ethically. I would ask my hon. colleague if the Conservatives are willing to look at changes to the laws to make sure that these kinds of practices are not allowed to go on without accountability measures.

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Context: House Hansard - 130 - Nov/18/22

Feb/6/23 3:07:57 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, Alberta energy workers are calling on the government to step up with a major financial commitment to meet the challenge of Joe Biden's massive investments in clean tech. In Alberta, that would be 200,000 jobs alone. It is no wonder the Alberta Federation of Labour is calling this the biggest economic shift since the Industrial Revolution. We know Conservatives do not believe in a clean energy future, but New Democrats do because clean tech would mean good-paying union jobs in Alberta, northern Ontario and across Canada. When will the government end its do-nothing approach and commit to major investments in this budget to ensure a clean-tech revolution for Canadians?

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Context: House Hansard - 110 - Oct/7/22

Nov/18/22 10:43:11 a.m.
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Re: Bill C-32

Madam Speaker, working with Unifor, the Alberta Federation of Labour and IBEW, we have been pushing the government to get some real standards in place to create a clean energy economy. We were pleased to see that we actually have some labour standards now, some labour obligations, for tax credits for new projects. That is significant. However, we have not yet seen the commitment for an industrial strategy to really drive a clean energy economy. At what point will we see, from the government, the money on the table required to transform us from a fossil fuel economy and make the investments needed to gather up the huge opportunities waiting in the clean energy economy?

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