- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $114,314.06
- Government Page
- Nov/9/23 2:28:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today is a good day for Canadian workers. The NDP has achieved a historic result. Anti-scab legislation that will give workers more power to demand better wages and working conditions has been introduced in the House. We used our leverage in Parliament to deliver legislation that the Liberals have always refused to introduce in the past. From now on, there will be a true balance of power at the bargaining table so that labour disputes, like the one at the Port of Québec, do not drag on.
Will the minister commit to working with us to pass this bill as quickly as possible?
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- Oct/24/23 3:17:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, 360 workers at the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation are on strike. With the rising cost of living, they are demanding fairer and more equitable wages. As we have seen in the past, the Liberals and the Conservatives alike will trample on workers' rights by imposing special legislation. We in the NDP firmly believe that these workers have the right to fight for better working conditions.
Can the Prime Minister assure us here and now that he will not trample on their rights by imposing special legislation?
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- Apr/24/23 2:29:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today is day six of the public service strike. This government is far from reaching a good agreement at the bargaining table.
It even seems as though the President of the Treasury Board is not taking this seriously. She is giving interviews with a big smile on her face. She is showing no respect for the workers who were there for us. It is time the minister was there for them.
Will the minister stop with the public relations job, start doing her real job and find a solution?
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- Apr/19/23 2:49:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I remember when I was elected in 2011. The Conservatives had just imposed special legislation against postal workers. It is crazy. Twelve years later, a Liberal government is threatening to do the same thing as the Conservatives.
The NDP is clear. We will always side with workers. Will the Prime Minister turn into a Conservative and impose special legislation or will he try to negotiate a good agreement for those who answered the call during the pandemic?
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- Mar/3/22 3:09:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, workers at the Office of the Auditor General have been on strike for three months and without a contract for more than three years. The President of the Treasury Board's absence and silence are not helping the situation.
The strike is dragging on and that is having a negative impact on performance audits of this government on important issues like emergencies, cybersecurity, homelessness and vaccine spending. It is time for the minister to get involved.
Will the minister step up and do something to ensure that these professionals get a fair and equitable contract?
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- Dec/3/21 12:38:05 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-3
Madam Speaker, this is my first speech in this 44th Parliament. As many of my colleagues have done, I want to take a moment to extend my sincere thanks to the people of Rosemont—La Petite‑Patrie for the confidence they have placed in me to represent them in this institution and to be their voice in the House. It truly is an immense honour to do so for a fourth time. I never thought I would last this long in this Parliament, but I will continue to serve with passion, drive and enthusiasm, to represent the progressive values and principles of the people of Rosemont—La Petite‑Patrie.
The House is debating Bill C‑3 today, and I must say that my NDP colleagues and I are extremely pleased to be able to rise in this place and discuss one of the two issues in the bill: the proposal to provide 10 days of paid sick leave for federally regulated workers.
Why are we so happy about this? It is because the NDP has been asking for it for two years, from the start of the pandemic. We are now in the midst of the fourth wave, and it seems like it will never end. There may be a fifth wave, based on what we are seeing in Europe and Africa with the omicron variant.
The NDP has been insisting for at least 18 months that we must give workers 10 days of paid sick leave. In 2020, the leader of the NDP spoke about this 22 times in the House. He asked the Liberals 22 times when this was coming and why they were not taking action, and he reminded them that this change was needed in order to protect people, institutions and our communities. However, the government only kicked the can down the road. It remained evasive, saying that this measure was not needed and that it was doing something else.
Then, in the middle of an election campaign this fall, the Liberals decided that the NDP had had a good idea and that they would act on it. After dragging their feet all through 2020 and 2021, after calling a pointless and costly election, and after waiting two months to recall the House, the Liberals threw together this bill at the last minute and now want to push it through.
The 10 days of sick leave is a protection for workers that the NDP has been calling for for a long time. The Liberals were a bit late to the game, but they finally saw the light, had a road to Damascus moment, had a revelation. This is a good thing and a victory for the NDP, which has been calling for this for months, for nearly two years.
I would still like to take a minute or two to talk about the context of this pandemic. Let us go back to March 2020. I remember that time very clearly. We were hearing about what was happening in Wuhan, China, where it all started. Then, we watched as the virus spread like wildfire around the entire planet.
At one point, the governments decided to shut everything down because things had become too dangerous. People were told not to go to work if they did not have to. They were told not to go out, not to see anyone, and to stay at home because it was too risky. They were told to wear masks and wash their hands. The economy was put on pause, something that has never happened before and I hope will never happen again.
I live near Saint‑Laurent Boulevard in Montreal. I no longer heard any cars going by, but I could hear birds singing, which never happens on that street. That shows how society just shut down all of a sudden and became paralyzed.
Sick people who had a cough or a fever but did not want to miss a day of work had to make an impossible choice if they did not have sick leave. I am referring to people who were allowed to go to work because they had essential jobs in the supply chain, the food sector or health care.
That had a major impact on everyone, on families. It was definitely a collective trauma. I hope we are past it now. I hope that we are heading in the right direction and that, together, we will be able to move on to the next step.
In a crisis, people die. People suffer. Thousands of people died. Tens of thousands of people were infected, and thousands overcame the disease. However, some people will experience serious, long-lasting effects for the rest of their lives. This shows how society was and continues to be shaken to its very foundation.
This crisis was revealing. I want to talk about two different aspects of it.
The first is the fragility of our health care system. We are very proud of our accessible, universal public health care system, but we have noted some major shortcomings. For example, our long-term care homes were not ready. The working conditions of health care workers were sometimes not good enough to convince employees to continue working and to come to work. We saw how ill-prepared and ill-equipped we were.
We did not learn any lessons from the SARS epidemic in 2003. The recommendations made at the time were not implemented. We therefore found ourselves with no vaccines and no gloves, masks or personal protective equipment. We saw how vulnerable that left us. Our health care system was undermined. I hope that we have learned from this pandemic, so that we will be able to deal with the next one. Let us be clear. We are trying to get out of this pandemic as quickly as possible, but in the years to come, there will inevitably be another one. That is why it is so unfortunate that, under successive Liberal and Conservative governments, we lost all our national vaccine production capacity. The NDP has proposed creating a Crown corporation, if necessary. That way, if the private sector is not interested, we will at least have the collective public capacity to produce vaccines to treat people.
Our health care system was fragile. There were problems with working conditions, staffing and preparedness. We have collectively been dropping the ball for years.
The second aspect is our social safety net. Earlier, I spoke about the holes in the health care system. The holes in our social safety net are more like abysses or craters. We quickly realized that the current EI system was leaving many people with nothing when businesses closed, people were asked to stay home, jobs were lost and things were falling apart.
The EI system already excluded 60% of workers. This means that of all the workers who pay EI premiums, more than half do not have access to benefits when they lose their job. That is unbelievable. It is pretty much the dream of any private insurer that does not want to pay. EI is a public tool that we collectively implemented in order to help people who lose their jobs and fall on hard times. However, it is just not working.
As I explained earlier, it was even worse with the pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis. People who contributed to EI were not able to access it, and on top of that, others who did not contribute, such as contract workers, self-employed workers and freelancers, had nothing. That is why the NDP demanded that the government provide direct assistance to offset the gaps in this deeply flawed program. We demanded that the Liberal government increase the Canada emergency response benefit from $1,000 to $2,000 a month, so that people could safely pay their rent and grocery bills. What the Liberals had originally proposed was not enough. We then wanted to expand the benefit to people who might still have been getting a small contract or a couple of hours of work here and there, so that it would cover freelancers and self-employed workers, who had been excluded from CERB. We made it so that people could work and earn up to $1,000 while receiving CERB. We also took action to help students, who had been completely forgotten.
We saw that our social safety net was not good enough and that many people did not have sick leave. I want to emphasize this, because, in the context of a pandemic, sick days are a solution to a public health problem. Sick leave is a social benefit. It benefits the worker. Workers benefit personally from being able to stay home and rest instead of going to work sick, and it is better that way. Everyone wants that.
If someone unfortunately does not have access to paid sick leave and they cannot afford to take a day or two off work because their budget is too tight and they have bills to pay, they are sometimes faced with an impossible choice. They have to choose between buying groceries and staying home to take care of themselves. If they choose to stay home to rest, they might not be able to pay their rent at the end of the month.
It is not just that person's health at stake, but the health of everyone, because we are in the midst of a pandemic. If that person has symptoms of COVID-19, if they are coughing or have a fever and they go to work anyway, they might spread the virus to the other people in their workplace.
Personal sick leave therefore become a tool and a collective method of self-defence. This is a public health issue. Sick leave lets people make rational decisions and protect others, including their family, neighbours, community and co-workers.
While I deplore the fact that the Liberals dragged their feet and took so long to come up with this concrete proposal, I am pleased to see that we can take a leadership role, take a step in the right direction and perhaps encourage some other provinces to adopt similar mechanisms, so that all workers can eventually be protected.
Let us talk about those mechanisms. We see room for improvement. Bill C-3 can be improved. I would even say that it must be improved. That is why it is really important that there be a parliamentary committee that studies the bill one day where we will be able to discuss, debate and propose amendments.
In this version of the bill, people have to work one calendar month to be entitled to one sick day. After five months, they will be entitled to five sick days, and so on.
I see two problems with that. The first is the notion of calendar months. For example, someone hired on February 6 would not get their first paid sick day until April. That person will not have worked every day in February, so they have to wait until they have worked the whole month of March to get their first paid sick day, which they can put in their leave bank. That means they would have to wait six or seven weeks to get that first paid sick day. Why not go with a certain number of days worked consecutively, regardless of the hiring date or start date? Why not base it on an actual month and not make people wait six or seven weeks? I think that is the first thing we need to fix.
The second thing that needs fixing is the bank of 10 days of sick leave. It was people in the health care sector who talked to us about it, including representatives I met with this week from an organization called the Decent Work and Health Network. They are concerned that a new employee has to wait until they bank enough days of sick leave before they can stay home sick. It can take a while to accumulate enough days. According to a U.S. study these representatives cited, it takes at least six days of sick leave for the leave to become truly accessible. That is when the person can really take them, or even dares to take them. It was reported that people with at least six days of sick leave banked take sick leave more than people who have banked only a day or two.
We need to explore the possibility of having a minimum number of days available from the start, before the banking process begins to reach 10 days of sick leave. I think that is something the parliamentary committee could do.
We are talking about technicalities, but they can make a big difference in people's lives. When people get sick, one day is rarely enough. The Decent Work and Health Network also talks about a survey that found that the median duration of leave for influenza is four days. If someone has only a day or two of leave banked, it may not be enough.
With regard to the mechanisms, I would also like to talk about how the employer is allowed to ask the employee to provide a medical certificate for a day of paid leave. For just one day of leave, the employer could require the employee to consult a physician in order to obtain a medical certificate justifying the absence. I believe that it is important to show good faith and to trust employees. Allowing this type of mechanism implies a presumption that abuse and fraud will take place. Is a doctor's note needed for just one day of leave, as opposed to four or five?
We need to ask ourselves this question because this mechanism could be a barrier. A person who suffers from gastroenteritis and who cannot go to work for a day could be asked for a medical certificate two weeks later. This complicates things. Not only will they have to take one day of leave, but they will have to make a doctor's appointment two weeks later to ask for a medical certificate.
That will clog up the health care system. The doctor we met with who was part of the group I mentioned told us that he had better things to do than sign papers for someone who took one or two sick days. His job is to treat people who are sick right now, not to prove, after the fact, that someone was previously sick. Furthermore, this group did a survey and found that the requirement to provide a medical certificate for taking a sick day was an impediment for 82% of workers. That is a lot.
This requirement outweighs the benefits of paid sick leave. It may seem silly, but the NDP believes that we cannot ignore that this is an obstacle for 80% of workers. This is something we need to take into account.
I want to move on from talking about the first part of the bill to the second part of Bill C‑3, which would amend the Criminal Code. Under Bill C‑3, threatening or intimidating health care workers or impeding them from entering their places of work, such as hospitals and clinics, would become aggravating factors. The bill would allow for harsher punishments to combat these forms of intimidation.
Unfortunately, over the past two years and especially in the past year, some very aggressive people who are against science, public health and vaccines have acted in a disgraceful manner. They intimidated and threatened health professionals who were going to hospitals to take care of our parents, grandparents, children and neighbours. It is mind-boggling. The NDP agrees that we need to implement a measure to address that issue. We said during the election campaign that we needed to take steps to protect health professionals. This is a major problem, and we cannot let people intimidate and threaten the workers who take care of us. That does not make any sense. We need to take steps to protect them, so this change to the Criminal Code is a good thing.
That being said, we must not infringe on these same workers' right to use pressure tactics when they are on strike as part of a collective bargaining process, for example. I think we need to take that into account and be very vigilant. In any case, the NDP will stay vigilant, in order to preserve the right to picket and strike as part of a labour dispute.
The NDP stands up for workers. We want to stand up for them so that they do not have rocks thrown at them by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. However, we also want to protect workers' rights so that when they are on strike because of a labour dispute, they can express themselves, demonstrate and make their demands and the reason for the labour dispute known.
That aspect is very important to the NDP. We agree with the principle of the bill, but we must be sure not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need to ensure that the right to picket and the right to demonstrate are protected in the event of a labour dispute or strike. For the NDP, this will be very important to see.
I thank the members for their attention, and I am ready to take questions.
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