- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Timmins—James Bay
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 63%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $134,227.44
- Government Page
- May/24/24 12:48:48 p.m.
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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.
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- Dec/14/23 4:22:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we remember the brutal 2011 Vale strike in Sudbury. Stephen Harper and Tony Clement allowed Inco and Falconbridge, two world-class mining companies, to be taken over by the corporate raider, Glencore. Then, Vale came in to try to break the back of the working class in Sudbury. Workers were out for over a year. It caused huge damage to the community, but people stood up, resisted and fought for better wages. I want to ask the member, who was in Sudbury at the time, about the damaging impacts of these kinds of strikes and the need to make sure we have rules in place so workers can negotiate fair agreements with their employers.
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- Dec/14/23 1:28:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have not seen any news that says that there is a strike at that mushroom farm, so I am not sure what the member is talking about. We are dealing with anti-scab legislation and not mushroom farms.
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- 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.
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