“I oppose this bill. It gives a single minister the power to end legal strikes, which takes away workers' rights under the Charter. The current system already works, and the government can already pass laws to end strikes after a debate in Parliament.”

“Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-39. To begin, I want to point out to Canadians that the Liberal government has once again introduced an omnibus bill of some 246 pages that inappropriately combines measures that do not belong in the same legislation. This ploy is an attempt to blur issues and blunt criticism. It disrespects Parliament and the voters who send us here to properly scrutinize bills and hold government accountable. It directly contradicts previous promises by Liberals not to use this odious practice inappropriately. Unfortunately, this is not surprising. Liberals are infamous for saying one thing at election time and doing the opposite once elected. As labour critic for the New Democratic Party, I will focus on the proposed changes to the Canada Labour Code contained in part 3 of this bill. Let there be no doubt that this bill contains one of the most serious attacks on workers’ rights in a generation: the entrenchment of the harmful misuse of section 107 of the Canada Labour Code. These changes would expand the federal government’s unilateral authority to terminate a legal strike in a manner more broadly than exists in any G7 country, including Donald Trump’s United States. At its core, this bill would prevent Canadian workers from meaningfully exercising their constitutionally protected freedoms of association and expression. It would restrict their charter right to withdraw their services. It would fundamentally alter the balance of power in collective bargaining in Canada, and the way it would do so is deeply troubling to anyone who supports transparency and accountability. Once again, it reveals a disturbing trend by the Liberal government of concentrating power in the hands of cabinet ministers to avoid being responsible to Parliament. That is the approach of authoritarian rulers, not democratic ones. Let me start by pointing out that ending lawful strikes was never the purpose of section 107. Since its inclusion in the code in 1984, this provision was always understood as an exceptional administrative power, not a weapon to violate workers’ rights. In fact, there have been previous attempts to stretch that authority in the past, including by the Harper government in 2011. Former Conservative labour minister Lisa Raitt has publicly stated that Conservatives contemplated the use of section 107 to end strikes, but decided against it based on legal advice that this was not a proper use of that provision. However, the Liberal government has ignored that history and taken the use of section 107 to an unprecedented extreme. In the last three years alone, Liberals have used section 107 10 times to intervene in labour disputes, most recently involving rail workers, port workers, postal workers and airline workers. In many cases, Liberals used this section to break strikes just hours after they began. Why is this objectionable? It is because the freedoms of association and expression have been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada to include the rights of workers to bargain collectively and withdraw their services in concert to advance their interests, so using the law in this way violates workers’ constitutional rights. Because corporate management has disproportionate power in the workplace with unilateral rights to manage and vastly superior financial resources, workers’ only way to counterbalance these is through withdrawing their services. Interfering with this strips workers of the only real power they have because this legislation undermines the collective bargaining process. If employers know that government will intervene on their behalf to end a strike, they have reduced incentive to bargain seriously and come to an agreement themselves. Members should not take my word for it. Employers like Air Canada have publicly admitted this. It is unnecessary. The federal government and employers already have the tools they need to protect the health and safety of the public or intervene if the Canadian economy is truly imperilled by a protracted labour dispute. Governments always have the power to bring in back-to-work legislation where the issues can be fully debated in public in this chamber and elected representatives are held accountable to their voters by voting in their seats. This has been done numerous times when the national interest requires it. Every labour code in the country, including the Canada Labour Code, has essential services provisions that allow any employer to make a case before an impartial adjudicator that a strike ought to be limited to preserve the health and safety of Canadians. These are routinely used in the cases of bargaining units like those of nurses, police officers and longshore workers. Now, in this legislation, the Liberals want the ability to violate workers’ rights even more easily. Far from containing any guardrails or government right to break strikes, this is a road map for how to do it. Bill C-39 would codify the minister’s unilateral power to end a legal strike and would make the minister’s own opinion the sole test for exercising that power. It would require the minister only to consider the report of a special mediator. This is someone, by the way, whom they appoint and whose recommendations they are entirely free to disregard. It states that the minister may consider any relevant issue they wish, with no benchmarks or limits expressed in the legislation. It would require the minister only to consider the impact of their decision on freedom of association, merely making them think about workers’ rights before violating them. In other words, federal workers can have their rights to take job action taken away by the sole opinion of a single cabinet minister for any reason they find convenient. The legislation is also counterproductive, and I believe it would harm the public’s interest. Undermining the right to strike is more likely to fuel conflict than prevent it. When workers are denied a legal means to withdraw their labour, disputes do not disappear; they risk becoming more confrontational and difficult to resolve. The history of labour relations and market economies makes this clear. When workers’ rights were suppressed, strikes did not disappear: They were frequent, protracted and often violent, and they tore communities apart. The facts prove that the legislation is not even necessary. The truth is that the current system of counterbalanced collective bargaining in this country works. About 95% of all collective agreements in Canada are successfully negotiated at the bargaining table by the parties themselves, with no job action. Canada is on track this year to have the fewest days lost to strikes in the federal sector since 1954. This is why unions across the country have warned against these provisions: They understand that Bill C-39 would fundamentally change the balance of power in labour relations and harm the Canadian economy by fuelling uncertainty and instability. Bea Bruske, the president of the Canadian Labour Congress, has been clear: Unions across this country are united. From coast to coast, across every sector, they are delivering the same message that unconstitutional restrictions on the right to strike are unacceptable and will be fought. The right to strike is not a privilege. It is protected by the charter and recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada. It is not a right to be respected only when it is ineffective. Strikes can disrupt. They can cause discomfort. They can cause economic consequences to employers and sometimes sections of the public. However, that is the very point of a strike. It is the most impactful, and frankly the only, way workers can demonstrate the value of their labour in the marketplace. By showing the effect the withdrawal of their labour has on society and on their employer, they make the case that they should be compensated accordingly. Let us all acknowledge in this place that labour rights have had and do have a very positive impact on Canadian society. Through the struggle and sacrifice of working people for the last 160 years, as well as the many men and women who took job action for fair wages, safer working conditions and a better life for their families, all Canadians have benefited. We all enjoy a standard of living that economies with no labour rights look on with envy. This debate is ultimately about more than labour law. It is about what kind of country we want to build and whose interests we seek to defend. New Democrats believe that strong countries are built by empowered workers. Strong economies are built through free and fair bargaining. Strong democracies respect constitutional rights. The legislation is built on the view that workers’ rights are an obstacle to nation building. That is wrong. Workers are the people who literally build this nation. New Democrats believe that if we want to build a stronger Canada, we must respect workers’ rights, value their voices and raise their standard of living, yet—”

“This bill has no safeguards to protect workers. It lets a minister end a strike on their own without any evidence. That violates the constitutional right to strike.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is funny that whenever this member and the current government want to deflect attention from their own actions, they point to someone else. It reminds me of my mother when I was in grade 3, when she asked me, “If Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you?” It is a ridiculous argument, but I want to address the misinformation embedded in the member’s question. There is not a single guardrail in the legislation, not one. We can read it. It says that it is through the sole opinion of the minister, taking into account any relevant consideration they want, that they may order the end of a strike. There is not a guardrail in the legislation. One person can end a strike based on no evidence whatsoever after a special mediator issues a report. The only misinformation is spread by the government in trying to tell Canadians that they put guardrails in this. There are no guardrails at all. This is a road map to violate Canadian workers’ constitutional right to strike, and that member knows it or he has not read the legislation.”

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“I oppose this bill. The government is trying to protect itself from lawsuits after forcing striking workers back on the job. Workers have a constitutional right to strike, and this government does not respect them.”

“Mr. Speaker, the answer is clearly no. In fact, I believe the real reason the legislation has been brought forth here in the House is that 12 hours after the flight attendants of Air Canada walked off the job, the Liberal government ordered them back to work. It was 12 hours after the rail workers went on strike that the government ordered them back to work. Do members know what happened? The Teamsters and CUPE filed court challenges saying that the government violated their charter rights. This case is before the courts right now, and in the government, the Liberals know they are going to lose, because the right to strike and the right to collectively bargain are respected charter rights recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada. The Liberals have attempted to charter-proof themselves by bringing in the legislation, but it will not work. By the way, this gives me a chance to point out that this is the first Liberal government in over 100 years not to have a minister of labour. If we want a signal of what the government thinks about workers, it is that it does not even think they deserve their own minister of labour. The Liberals have a Minister of Jobs and Families. Now, that is a big slap in the face to organized labour in this country, and I can tell members that it is noticed.”

“The Liberal government has violated workers' rights to strike ten times in three years. They force workers back to work right away, which helps management and hurts fair bargaining.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is not a matter of thinking; it is a matter of observing. I have watched workers in this country in the last 36 months have their rights violated 10 times by the Liberals, including by the member across from me. Of course, they have violated strike rights, and every time they take away a worker’s right to strike hours after they began. They did not even wait until there was any impact on the public or on the employer. In fact, that is why Air Canada said it was not bargaining seriously at the table: It knew that the government was going to order the workers back to work before the strike even started, and that is what the Liberals did. They are doing the bidding of management. They are tipping the scales in favour of management. They are interfering with collective bargaining and violating workers’ constitutional rights. Workers know it and unions know it; that member should also know it.”

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“I oppose this bill. It gives ministers too much power to stop legal strikes, weaken environmental rules, and rush talks with First Nations. The government must protect workers and nature, and treat Vancouver Island and rural communities fairly.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise tonight to speak to Bill C-39, the building Canada strong act. This debate is about what kind of Canada we want to build and about government priorities. We all agree that Canada needs to build. We need housing. We need clean energy. We need transmission lines. We need public infrastructure. We need good union jobs, and we need to plug economic leakages. We need to diversify our economy and stand up to the economic threats coming from Donald Trump, but we do not want to stand up to Donald Trump by using Donald Trump’s policies. A bill like Bill C-5 would not even have come forward from Stephen Harper. Someone from the Conservative bench said earlier that this is like using a bulldozer and a sledgehammer. Bill C-39 is asking Canadians to accept an enormous transfer of power in the name of speed: more power over workers, more discretion over environmental protections and accelerated timelines for decisions affecting indigenous rights. My colleague from Vancouver East said that beneath this bill “are serious questions about who gets power, who gets certainty and who bears the risk.” We are going to talk about that. Let us start with the workers. The Canadian Labour Congress commissioned a comparative legal analysis that found Bill C-39 would give the federal government “broader unilateral power to end a legal strike than exists in any other G7 country.” Think about that. Even in the United States, the president cannot simply end a national emergency strike and oppose a permanent binding settlement, as the Liberals are proposing here today. There are legal thresholds, court involvement and limits on intervention that would stop this from happening, yet the government wants to give a Canadian minister, any minister, extraordinary power when a strike is deemed to adversely affect what they deem is in the national interest. A strike is supposed to create economic pressure. That is the point. Workers do not have the power of a multinational corporation. Their power comes from standing together when necessary and, if needed, withholding their own labour. If the government can intervene whenever that pressure becomes too effective, employers have less incentive to bargain fairly. We have heard from the CLC, CUPE, Unifor, the United Steelworkers and other labour organizations that have raised serious concerns about these changes. Instead of dismissing those concerns, the government needs to listen to the people who actually represent those workers. It needs to listen to those labour unions. The Liberals keep saying that they are friends of labour. Why are they not listening to them? The same principle needs to apply to our environment. Environmental assessment is not red tape. Asking what happens to our water, our climate, endangered species and human health before approving a project is basic due diligence. A one-year deadline does not make nature move faster. It is not acceptable to first nations. We cannot undo extinction. We cannot simply restore contaminated water or destroyed habitat after the fact. Environmental organizations have specifically warned that the provisions in Bill C-39 could weaken protections for species at risk, including the critically endangered southern resident killer whale, which my friend from Saanich—Gulf Islands has raised repeatedly. Indigenous rights cannot simply be squeezed into a government project management schedule. Meaningful consultation requires time, resources and genuine participation before decisions are made. Is it the government that is going to decide when a consultation is complete? Is that how it is going to work moving forward? We want to build Canada, but let us build Canada where workers have the power at the bargaining table, where indigenous rights are respected, where environmental protection is part of the national interest and where communities do not carry the risk while corporations collect the rewards. Building Canada strong cannot simply mean building Canada faster. It must mean building Canada better, building Canada fairer and building Canada together. My riding, Courtenay—Alberni, is about a 10-hour trip door to door. My riding is 7,900 square kilometres and represents 34 communities. There are 184 elected officials in my riding, and we are tired. We feel like we are not being heard. It is crazy that I am going to refer to Brian Lilley, but he highlighted that Alberta has 5.1 million people, and it has six senators. We know that they need to be heard. That is clear. I come from Vancouver Island. We know that we are better off and stronger together. Absolutely, separation is not something we talk about, but on the other side of the Rockies, we know it is harder to be heard, and on Vancouver Island, I can tell this House what it is like. We have not had a Senate appointment since 1970. Brian Lilley highlighted that Alberta has six senators and Atlantic Canada has 30. We have not had a single Senate appointment since 1970. What does that mean? It means we do not have a Senate seat on the fisheries committee at the Senate. Why is that important? I am going to talk a bit about that. I am talking about building Canada strong. Building Canada strong includes rural communities. Wealth starts in rural communities, but it leaves rural communities. That is what we are used to. When Liberals talk about regions of national interest, why are they not talking to regions and making us part of the national interest? They promised to fix our fisheries. On the east coast, they fish it or they lose their quota. They do not have foreign ownership of their quota. They do not allow it. We also know who owns their quota. On the west coast, there is no public registry, we allow foreign ownership, and we allow concentration of licences. A lot of my friends in rural Canada, a lot of people in my riding in coastal British Columbia, go out fishing. They lease from people we call “slipper skippers” who represent the corporate interest that owns the quota. We do not even know who they are. A lot of them could be from Russia or China, could be our adversaries or organized crime. It is unbelievable that this is allowed. In 2018, a study at the fisheries and oceans committee unanimously supported changing it so we could come up with an independent fishery model that reflected the east coast. Nothing has changed. For decades, we have seen this happen. I am going to quote Dan Edwards, who wrote this week in his Substack, “The value of that asset can rise while the security of the person doing the fishing declines.” That is exactly what is happening. Another thing he said was, “Government policy helped produce those losses. Government has a responsibility to help repair them.” What happened to fast-tracking in dealing with that issue? When they want to talk about building Canada stronger, what about us on Vancouver Island? Here is what I hear from first nations when they hear about fast-tracking projects: What about fast-tracking their treaties? What about fast-tracking their agreements? How come the government is not prioritizing that? Is that not nation building? We have 65,000 homeless people in this country, including in my riding. It would cost $14 billion to house them. The Liberals can find $45 billion for a pipeline that increases our GDP by 0.6%, but when we look at the impact on people who are homeless, it is much greater than that. The Mental Health Commission did a study and said unaddressed mental health is costing us 5% to 6% of our GDP, $200 billion a year. The PBO also did a study and said it would cost $4.9 billion to ensure we had parity with mental and physical health, that we could make mental health an insured benefit, based on my bill, under the mental health parity act, but the government chose not to do that. These are economic leakages and economic opportunities, but they impact every home, every community, including in my riding. We can talk about ferries. Colleagues have heard me talk about this repeatedly. Right now, the east coast gets $182.5 million for operating its ferries. We get $38 million in B.C., despite the fact that we move 22 million passengers and the east coast moves 365,000. Let us go back to Confederation. When we joined Confederation, Vancouver Island had 15,000 people, while P.E.I. had 97,000 people. Today, Vancouver Island has more people than Newfoundland and P.E.I. We get six dollars per capita for ferry operating costs; they get $125. If the government wants to build back stronger, it needs to include the rest of Canada and make sure we have fairness and equity. That is all we are asking for. When it comes to shipbuilding, ship recycling and ship repair, we can build back better. We can look to Norway, where they take small communities, places like Port Alberni, underused deep-sea ports, and make them shipbuilding, ship repair and ship recycling facilities. We could lead the world since we have the longest coastline in the world. We are tired of being ignored. If we want to build back stronger, we need to make sure that places like Vancouver Island are included in building back stronger, that the government actually takes the time to listen to us, that we have proper representation from Vancouver Island that reflects that, and that we get acknowledged and not dismissed when we bring forward ideas of unfairness and inequities or when we feel that the government is not acting on the things it has promised to do for too long.”

“I oppose this bill. Norway uses billions in oil and gas money to fund clean energy and help its people. Instead of taxing big oil profits to pay for clean power, this government lets companies keep the money.”

“Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate my colleague talking about Norway, because Norway, as my colleague knows, also has a sovereign wealth fund. They have taken a portion of finite resources from their oil and gas industry, and they have created a fund that is $1.7 trillion right now. In terms of royalties alone, they earn over $200 billion a year off those royalties. They have taken leadership on EVs. What did the Liberals do? They rolled back their commitment on the EV mandate. They created a sovereign wealth fund, but they did not fund it with an excess profit tax or by taking royalties from oil and gas. They are letting them have a free ride. I keep bringing it up in the House. We have this generational opportunity right now. Oil and gas are posting record profits. Carve off some of those profits, invest in future generations and invest in projects for the future, like clean energy and like a transmission line. Instead, they are just letting it flow to CEOs and their investors. That is exactly what this bill is like.”

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“The government is rushing this bill through too fast. It ignores workers, environmental groups, local towns, and First Nations. The government must slow down and listen to them.”

“Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate working with my colleague as a fellow British Columbian. He is absolutely right. Not only are they fast-tracking the bill, they are trying to fast-track everything: fast-tracking rights, fast-tracking the duties and responsibilities of this place, and fast-tracking over environmental organizations, over local communities and over first nations. Again, Stephen Harper would not even think of bringing forward legislation like this and moving at this speed. The streets would be full. This is unacceptable. It is time for the government to take a step back, listen to labour, listen to environmental organizations, listen to first nations, and make sure it is listening to government lawyers and doing what is responsible and what we have done traditionally in this place.”

“I oppose this bill. It hurts workers' rights. The government needs to stop rushing this bill through and talk to labour groups.”

“Mr. Speaker, my colleague asks excellent questions in here. I will highlight this, that when we talk about section 107, we were actually pushing the government to get rid of it so that it stopped overriding the rights of workers. Instead, what are the Liberals doing? They are making it even worse. I completely agree with my colleague. The government needs to sit down with labour. It is ignoring their requests, completely ignoring them. It is ignoring so many other stakeholders when it comes to the legislation. It is fast-tracking and ramming this through. It is like Bill C-5 repeating itself.”

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“I am asking everyone to agree to set the official time to 12:43 a.m.”

“Mr. Speaker, I would like to seek unanimous consent to see the clock at 12:43 a.m.”