I am excited to welcome you to this link on your local union website. Firstly I want to thank all of you who helped during the election campaign, without you we would not have this opportunity to facilitate change.
Through this link "From the Hill" I can not only keep you up to date about important issues, this link will also provide you with a quick and easy way to communicate with me through either my constituency or Ottawa offices.
Currently I am getting down to the job of representing the Welland Riding in Ottawa. During and following the election campaign I enjoyed talking with many of you about the issues that concern you the most. You told me loud and clear, the issues that are important to you included; an economy that will create jobs and benefit working families, a health care system that provides you with the services you need in your own community, government regulations that guarantee workers Pension Security and a Social Assistance system that helps those in need when they need it.
Be assured that I will be fighting for these and all of the issues that are important to you.
Malcolm Allen Member of Parliament Welland, Ontario
CANADIAN FAMILIES SHOULD COME BEFORE AMERICAN EXPORTS: ALLENs
March 18th 2010
OTTAWA – A dangerous gap between U.S. and Canadian food inspection practices highlights the Conservatives’ failure to fix Canada’s food safety system, says New Democrat Food Safety Critic Malcolm Allen (Welland).
Plants packaging meat for the U.S. market are inspected daily in order to meet U.S. standards, while plants that package meat for Canadian dinner tables are inspected only once a week.
"“This double standard is unacceptable. Canadian lives are not worth less than American lives, and exports should not be more important than the safety of Canadian families," said Allen.
The government recently increased inspections at U.S.-bound meat processing plants to every 12 hours after the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service determined that Canadian food inspections failed to meet U.S. safety standards, putting the export market in jeopardy.
Existing CFIA food inspectors are being worked overtime to make up the gap. While the government promised 70 new inspectors in September 2009, CFIA lacks enough inspectors to meet the increased requirement. According to the meat inspectors’ union, no additional inspectors have actually joined the front lines of food inspection.
"The government was quick to respond to a threat to U.S. food safety, but has yet to ramp up Canadian inspections to match, and still hasn’t hired enough inspectors to do the job," said Allen. “It's been two years since the listeriosis crisis, and eight months since the Weatherill report told the government how to fix the system. Why is it taking them so long to act?"
"Investigators are probing an unusual number of listeriosis cases, including five deaths in Ontario this year. Two illnesses have recently been linked to a listeriosis recall of Siena brand deli meats.
"Deli sandwiches and kids’ lunches should not be a source of fear," Allen said. “The government must start treating Canadian food safety as a priority."
Why I voted against Budget 2010
March 15th 2010
Budgets are about choices. As a former financial secretary, I've had to balance my share of books, and I know how hard it is to choose between competing priorities.
With Budget 2010, however, the Conservatives made the wrong choices and the Liberals helped them. Rather than helping the real victims of this recession, they chose to give tax handouts to banks whose profits just doubled.
Budget 2010 does nothing on the issues that should be national priorities: jobs and EI, seniors and pensions, health and the environment. It offers no help for people who lost their jobs in layoffs at companies like John Deere and Eurocopter, or workers who lost their pensions, or families who can't pay their bills.
There's nothing for people set to exhaust their EI benefits with no new jobs on the horizon. Some 1.5 million people are still out of work across Canada, including a whopping 11% of people in the Niagara area. There’s no new ideas for anyone hoping to update their skills and receive job training—just a reprinted page from last year's budget.
There's also nothing for the nearly 300,000 seniors who live in poverty in Canada, despite the fact that a simple $4000 increase to the Guaranteed Income Supplement could lift thousands above the poverty line.
As I said, budgets are about choices. Rather than helping struggling Canadians, the government chose to give $6 billion in handouts to big corporations, like the banks whose greed got us into trouble in the first place.
Rather than helping, they handed you a tax hike. Starting in 2011, employees and employers will be hit with a shocking $19 billion hike on EI premiums. In other words, they are taking from you and giving to banks and big oil.
That tax burden will be even harder for Ontarians, who will start paying the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) on everything from haircuts and movie tickets, to funerals and vitamins starting this summer.
My fellow New Democrats and I could not support this budget as written, but we want Parliament to work for Canadians. That’s why we moved a budget sub-amendment to shelve the corporate tax cuts and put the savings towards better priorities.
The full amendment called for the government to strengthen the GIS, enhance EI, increase the CPP, protect pensions threatened by bankrupt companies, eliminate clauses designed to weaken environmental protections, and stop the HST.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives and Liberals voted against the changes, and stuck to their misplaced priorities.
My job as an MP is to stand up for the people of my community and fight on the issues that affect your lives. That means I have to ask certain questions when voting: Will this create family-supporting jobs? Will it protect pensions, and help the seniors who built this country? Will it build a healthy, fair, clean-energy future?
I believe the Conservative budget made all the wrong choices. That’s why I voted no.
Malcolm Allen, MP
Riding of Welland
GREEN-ENERGY MANUFACTURING PERFECT FIT FOR NIAGARA: ALLEN
March 12th 2010
A solar energy manufacturing hub that will produce hundreds of jobs is great news for Welland, and could be the start of a green-energy industry boom in the region, said New Democrat MP Malcolm Allen (Welland).
"Welland is perfect for this company, and the impact of these new jobs will be felt throughout the region," said Allen. "People in Welland should be very proud of their city today, and Oneworld Energy should feel confident that it has made the right choice."
The city announced a partnership with Oneworld Energy Inc. and its subsidiary, COU Solar Inc., to develop a solar energy manufacturing hub in Welland. Some 200 to 300 jobs will be created directly; including indirect jobs, the hub could create employment for over 1,000 people.
Ontario is becoming a hotspot for renewable energy projects like solar and wind farms. Other green-energy manufacturing companies looking for a place to set up shop should take a hard look at communities in the Niagara region, Allen said.
"We have hundreds of smart, highly-skilled workers ready to go," Allen said. "We have the manufacturing infrastructure, major transportation routes, and the Canada-US border right next door. This is the perfect place for companies that want excellent quality and fast return on their investment."
Life and death shouldn't depend on your postal code
Feb 25th 2010
Dear Constituents of Niagara,
Canadians' chances of surviving an accident or emergency shouldn't depend on their postal code.
That’s according to the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, who recently called on the federal and provincial governments to set standards for treatment, including the maximum time and distance of a patient's trip to an emergency department. They believe that Canada needs national trauma-care standards to ensure that citizens can count on the same basic standard of care in an emergency no matter where they live. They're right.
Provincial governments across the country are struggling with rising health-care costs as government revenues drop due to corporate tax cuts or reduced tax revenues. At the same time, hospitals in several provinces have been forced to temporarily close emergency departments because of a shortage of doctors. It's an enormous challenge to balance fiscal responsibility and the need to provide quality care.
However, people in the Niagara region know all too when what happens when a government hacks spending and then leaves the hard budget choices to non-elected officials. The Local Health Integration Network appointed by the province to oversee the Niagara Health System approved the closure of emergency departments in the hospitals in Fort Erie and Port Colborne, all in an effort to save $28-million. Local residents, community leaders and politicians, including myself, strongly opposed the closures.
It’s debatable whether the LHINs took into account local realities such population booms during summer vacation season, or the provincial government’s strategy of encouraging southern growth. According to the ONDP, the LHINs' provincially-appointed boards of directors lack the expertise or the tools to properly wield the enormous responsibility they’ve been given over how our health-care dollars are spent. Since the board was appointed by the Provincial Liberals, Niagara residents have no way of holding it accountable.
Regardless, the closures have created a situation in which an accident victim might live or die based on where he or she lives. That's unacceptable.
Health care is a provincial jurisdiction, and for the most part it is up to the Provinces to decide how health care dollars are spent. However, Medicare is a national program funded by the federal Canada Health Transfer, and its common features and basic standards of coverage are laid out in the Canada Health Act. The fact that these basic standards do not include guidelines for emergency care is a serious oversight that should be corrected.
Emergency-care standards would not involve providing identical services in every community, since there are limited resources, doctors and specialists, and different regional needs. Instead, national standards would set basic guidelines such as an acceptable standard time and distance for a person to reach to effective emergency care, and how emergency rooms should be staffed, funded, and equipped. This would provide clarity for health care providers and confidence for Canadians.
Canadians deserve the same level of care wherever they live, and that requires standards that would apply across the country. It's time that all levels of government work together to lay down the bottom line for emergency care.
Sincerely,
Malcolm Allen, MP
Protecting and Expanding your Pension
Feb 29th 2010
Dear Constituents of Niagara,
Pensions should be protected in Canada, and people should be able to retire with confidence and dignity no matter where they worked. Canadians should never have to lie awake at night wondering whether they’ll receive the pensions they worked so hard for.
Pensions are an urgent issue in our community—not only because our riding has the fourth-oldest population in Canada. We also have a disproportionate share of pensions lost or put at risk due to the economic recession. Thorold’s largest industrial employer, AbitibiBowater, is currently under bankruptcy protection with underfunded pension liabilities of approx. $1.3 billion. Around 800 retirees, workers and their families could face financial and personal hardship as a result. Employees at companies like Vale Inco and Nortel face the same thing.
Pensions are not handouts or bonuses–they’re deferred wages. Pensions are part of an agreed-upon compensation package for hours worked, and these wages should be there in their entirety when an employee retires.
The NDP pushed hard for and played a central role in crafting the Wage Earner Protection Act (WEPPA) in 2007. The act amended both the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BIA) and the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) to ensure that unpaid wages in the event of bankruptcy were paid to workers, while also setting up super creditor status for unpaid pension contributions.
New Democrats are also pushing for all-party support of my colleague Wayne Marston’s Bill C-476, which would close loopholes in prior legislation that allowed companies to leave their retirees high and dry while they wind-up their pension plans or go into restructuring proceedings.
We've also proposed a self-financing, mandatory pension insurance system—funded by the plan sponsors—and a public facility that would "adopt" orphaned pension plans.
While Members of Parliament should fiercely defend your pension security, we must also look out for all those Canadians who have no workplace pensions, and for those who recently saw their private retirement savings go up in smoke. We know that while private retirement savings systems fared badly during the financial market collapse, the public elements—Old Age Security (OAS), the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) and the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans (CPP/QPP)-remain rock solid.
The CPP in particular is a portable, risk-free, indexed for inflation, cheaply administered national program with predictable defined benefits. It’s also already in place-93% of Canadians are already members. No other option provides so many advantages at so little cost, and New Democrats believe Canadians should no longer be prevented from contributing as much as they choose to the best retirement savings vehicle available.
We've therefore proposed working with the provinces to phase-in a doubling of CPP benefits (from about $11,000/yr. to almost $22,000/yr). Combined with the current OAS benefit, this would guarantee Canadians up to 63% replacement of pre-retirement income, compared to the present 38%. The cost? An additional 2.5% payroll deduction-less than what you pay in administration fees on many RRSPs.
Canadians should be able to count on the respect, dignity and security they deserve when they retire. We have the tools, and New Democrats have proposed the legislation. Now is the time for national leadership to resolve our national pensions crisis.
Sincerely,
Malcolm Allen, MP
Riding of Welland
ACTION NEEDED ON ABITIBIBOWATER PENSION SHORTFALL
Feb 2nd 2010
OTTAWA – The government must act to protect the pensions that Canadian retirees have worked hard for, says New Democrat MP Malcolm Allen (Welland). Allen called on the government to meet with representatives of AbitibiBowater and the Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union to discuss regulatory changes that would resolve the pension shortfall threatening workers’ retirement security.
"Flaherty promised back in November to meet with AbitibiBowater and the union, but despite Parliament being prorogued, he somehow hasn’t found the time," says Allen. "AbitibiBowater pensioners, workers and their families need more than just empty promises; they need to know that the pension plan they contributed to during their working lives is there for them when they need it."
AbitibiBowater, Thorold’s largest industrial employer, is currently under bankruptcy protection as a result of the economic recession. Around 800 retired and currently-employed workers and their families face financial and emotional hardship because their pension plan is underfunded by $1.3 billion.
In the event of bankruptcy, the pensions that retirees and workers are counting on would be reduced by an average of 25%. AbitibiBowater management and CEP have proposed a pension trust to protect retirement incomes, and are calling on the federal government to make the necessary regulatory changes.
"Canada has a national pensions crisis that demands national leadership," says Allen. "The government must step up and ensure that retirees have the respect, dignity and retirement security they deserve."
Malcolm Standing up for Pensions
Tuesday October 27, 2009
"Mr. Speaker, seniors and retirees in my riding of Welland are deeply concerned about whether or not the savings they have accumulated during their lifetime of hard work is going to be enough to adequately sustain them in their retirements.
In fact at least 11 million Canadians have only their public pensions to rely upon for their retirement, and at current levels, those pensions offer benefits that are far from adequate, forcing all too many seniors back into the workforce instead of enjoying their retirement years.
New Democrats have proposed a plan that will protect the pensions of seniors. This plan includes increasing the GIS in order to end seniors' poverty, strengthening the CPP with a goal of doubling benefits, developing a national insurance program, funded by plan sponsors, that will guarantee pensioners $2,500 a month in the event of a bankruptcy or pension plan failure, and creating a national facility to adopt workplace pension plans of companies in bankruptcy or in difficulty.
New Democrats are leading the way on pension reform and it is time for the government to follow our lead. The seniors of Canada deserve to live with dignity and respect, and New Democrats will continue to fight to ensure every senior in Canada receives the pension benefits they deserve."
Malcolm in the House on NAFTA
September 29, 2009
Madam Speaker, there is no question about what we have seen in the riding of Welland from north to south, because it is five communities. I talked about Statistics Canada, but the income level in my own riding is now one of the poorest in the province of Ontario. It used to be the highest. Before NAFTA it had the highest per capita income in the province of Ontario as a manufacturing centre. It is now at the bottom, with increases in child poverty and increases in family poverty and family breakup and all of the social ills that come with that. It was because of this blind sense that somehow free trade is good for people. The government will feed it to you, so they should just eat it because it is good for them. My old gran used to say, "Just have this cod liver oil; it is good for you". There was no proof that it was good for us; we just had to take it. Preceding that, my whole sense with the Liberals was that they wanted us to just do it because we would be better off at the end of the day.
My riding of Welland is living testimony to the failure of not only chapter 11, but NAFTA. It is quintessentially the place, ground zero, for what NAFTA has wreaked upon the Canadian economy. We have seen, as I said, the income level from the highest in the province not less than 20 years ago to one of the lowest in the province, in a matter of less than one generation. It is tantamount to the absence of any sense of leadership from either the previous Liberal government and certainly from the Conservative government about what it takes for folks to actually prosper in the economy. Those parties have no sense of it. They talked about their management. They talked about how they were able to do things, but when it comes to helping Canadians, to help manage their economy for them, Canadians got left behind. Shame on both parties when they were in government for allowing that to happen, because my constituents are saying that someone needs to help. That is why they are looking at us as parliamentarians and saying, "It is time for you to step up. It is time for you to enact trade deals that are good for us, not for multinationals". It is about us, our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues across our constituencies, our children and our grandchildren when they come. It is ultimately about helping them. That is why I thought all of us came to this place.
The stats clearly show that what the Liberal government and the Conservative government have done to Canadians is absolutely dishonourable. We have let them slide behind because of what we have done. They did not do this. We as parliamentarians, the Liberal government, the Conservative government, did this to them. They did not ask for it. They sent folks here honestly who simply said what the member for Kings-Hants said this morning, "You are better off". The truth is, they are not. Saying it will not make it so. To stand in the House and say they are better off is patently false. It is just false. Not only is it false, it is unfair to those out there who are listening to us say it and hoping it is true, even though their reality and their life is, "I know it is not true", but they are hoping maybe their neighbours are experiencing something that they are not. If truth be told, their neighbours are experiencing exactly the same thing, which is that they are all sinking. We have allowed them to sink and not even bothered to give them a life vest. That is absolutely wrong.
CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS WALK AWAY FROM EI:
Tuesday, September 4, 2009
Local Families are paying the price for Harper's Lack of Leadership
Welland - New Democrat MP Malcolm Allen is calling on the Harper government to drop its stand against making important changes to the EI system and start demonstrating the leadership needed to ensure Canadians receive the benefits they have earned.
"Harper first denied the recession was coming and then refused to support the EI system in the budget with the resources needed to process mounting claims," said Allen. "I understand that the failure of leadership to change eligibility requirements to EI is ideological for the Conservatives, but the failure to provide Service Canada with the resources needed to process claims is nothing short of irresponsible and uncompassionate."
Allen is expressing deep frustration on behalf of at least 15 laid off workers from Vineland Manufacturing in late June who have yet to have their EI claims processed.
"The Vineland claimants have waited long past the required two weeks to start receiving benefits and to have to put your bills on hold for over two months is downright cruel" says Allen.
The Harper government, with the support of the Liberals, has mismanaged the Employment Insurance system, plundering the $57 billion surplus generated by the contributions of workers and employers and underfunding the new EI account.
New Democrats have a strong preference to make the minority Parliament work and implementing the proposed NDP changes to EI eligibility and immediate support for the processing of claims would send a strong message to Canadians that the Prime Minister also wants Parliament to work.
HARPER CONSERVATIVES ARE FACILITATING FOREIGN TAKEOVERS OF CANADIAN INDUSTRY:
Friday, August 7, 2009
New Democrats call on Harper government to stop greasing the wheels in the sale of Canadian companies
OTTAWA -The Harper government must stand up for Canadian jobs and stop rubber-stamping the sale of Canadian businesses to foreign nationals, say New Democrats.
"Through its stimulus bill, the Harper government, supported by the Liberals, is facilitating foreign takeovers by phasing in a dramatic rise in the threshold that triggers an Industry Canada review. Currently, the sale of companies with a value under $312 million are exempt from review. Within four years, it will be $1 billion. This is unacceptable," said New Democrat Malcolm Allen (Welland). "Harper's short-sighted vision for the Canadian economy means that more and more Canadian operations are closing their doors and heading stateside."
The Harper government is bending over backwards to facilitate the sale of Canadian industry to foreign nationals. The sell-off of Stelco and now Nortel are only recent examples. In fact, the Harper government is going so far as to allow the Export Development Corporation (EDC), a crown corporation, to provide Nokia or Ericsson with $300 million to finance their takeover bids.
"New Democrats are demanding that the Harper government get behind Canadian companies wanting to build and grow in our own backyard with the same vigour as they devote to supporting foreign takeovers," said Allen. "New Democrats are committed to stopping the cycle of selling off the manufacturing future of Canada."
"The Harper Conservatives have opportunities to redeem themselves from selling out Canadians by supporting the repatriation efforts of companies like Lakeside Steel Inc., which is fighting to bring back Canadian jobs.
"It was under the watch of the Harper government that former Canadian-owned Stelco plants in Hamilton and Nanticoke were sold off and then shut down by U.S. Steel," said New Democrat Industry Critic Brian Masse. "New Democrats are committed to supporting the repatriation of Canadian jobs by Canadian business."
New Democrat Deputy Industry Critic Wayne Marston echoes the call to support working Canadians. "When our government allows Canadian industry to be taken over by foreign interests, they are essentially handing over our national sovereignty," said Marston. "For New Democrats, Canadian interests always come first."
Edscha Canada
The situation at Edscha Canada in Niagara Falls is absolutely appalling. We have a contract bargained in good faith by the CAW and a company that is refusing to live up to its end of the deal. The refusal of the company to provide its workers with the severance and benefits they are owed is becoming an all too familiar situation. We need to take a serious look at the leadership in the federal and provincial parliaments who have allowed these situations to become a regular occurrence, day after day across the country.
I can tell you that myself, and the New Democrat team will continue to push for changes to protect workers from this type of treatment. We will fight in parliament and with you in our communities to make sure workers are treated fairly and to uphold the principles of collective bargaining.
New Democrats demand better for Canada's workers and will continue to fight for you.
Malcolm in response to the Conservative's "5 extra weeks of EI"
Mr. Speaker, I hate to sound like a broken record, but I have said this in the House about a dozen times now.
Five weeks of nothing is still nothing. If one does not qualify, five weeks makes no difference.
The Association of Canadian Colleges and Universities has said quite clearly if the government does not provide somewhere close to about $1.5 billion to build spaces in community colleges, those apprenticeship programs with no training spaces will not mean a tinker because one will not have a seat to actually let one sit in. They are basically at the top end and there are no places for one to sit.
Yes, they need the added five weeks. Congratulations for adding the five weeks for those who qualify but what are we going to do about the other 54% that do not. Let us just leave them out there with nothing. That is a typical attitude. Let us leave them out. Fifty-four per cent does not mean anything to us. We will just simply discard them.
What we say is, no. Eighty-six per cent is what it used to be. The government has the opportunity to bring that other 30% back into the system.
Malcolm on his bill C-279 to protect your severance
Mr. Speaker, as far as those who are supportive of the bill, Canadian workers are supportive. I need no other validators in this country besides Canadian workers. Those working and those who are unemployed have said to me for the past 20 years that I have been an EI advocate in different venues that indeed this is what they want to see happen. I have not met a laid off worker yet who has not said, "My severance shouldn't be touched".
As far as the costing, it is simply a delaying tactic. Severance delays unemployment insurance. That is all that it does. One can still collect the same amount of employment insurance at the end. If one is so unfortunate as to be unemployed that length of time, one simply eats up one's severance and eats up one's entitlement to EI.
There actually is not any cost to the EI system per se because of severance pay. What it does do is it lets people keep their house. It perhaps lets people keep youngsters who may be involved in recreational or cultural activities for perhaps an extra month or two. It keeps people out of abject poverty hopefully until they can get a job. That is what keeping one's severance does at no cost to the EI fund.
I repeat that, keeping one's severance is no cost to the EI fund because one is going to qualify for EI anyway and one is going to collect those numbers of weeks. The old argument was, if one got EI from day one, and had eight weeks worth of severance, we can take that out of the fund by that eight weeks.
In this day and age that is not the case. We all know that. The workers are entitled to it. They ought to be able to keep it and hopefully the House will pass the bill.
Liberals vote against help for middle class workers as bill C-279 fails at second reading
Thursday June 11, 2009
OTTAWA – Yesterday, New Democrat Malcolm Allen's (Welland) Private Members Bill to protect the pensions and severances of laid-off workers from being considered income when applying for Employment Insurance fell at 2nd reading in the House of Commons.
Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals joined with the Harper government to vote down the bill which would have allowed laid-off workers to keep their severances and pensions without costing the Employment Insurance system any new money. The bill was meant simply to allow people to access Employment Insurance sooner.
"I am disappointed that the Liberals and Conservatives couldn’t see the relief this bill would have provided," said Allen. “This is was a real opportunity for the House to reach across party lines and support changes to Employment Insurance that would help middle class families stabilize their incomes rather than hitting rock bottom after a lay-off. It is really shameful."
Allen says that in the long run, his bill would have actually saved the government money on retraining since people will have the financial security to return to school on their own accord.
Malcolm on GM Closure
Friday 15 May 2009
"Mr. Speaker, yesterday we witnessed the closure of the GM truck plant in Oshawa. Canadians mourn the end of almost a century of truck making in the region. Our thoughts and hearts go out to the workers and their families.
The closing of the award-winning facility that produced the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra will affect thousands of workers and their families, further impacting an already devastated industry and the communities. It is a tragic irony that what was originally a Canadian company established by Sam McLaughlin would be taken over by Americans only to have those jobs and production shifted to Mexico.
My NDP colleagues and I will continue to speak up for auto workers and their families in Oshawa, in my community and throughout Canada. We will continue to press the government for immediate, meaningful and long-term action to help preserve a vital Canadian industry."
Pension Security
April 2009
Thank you very much for bringing your concerns to us. Rest assured the NDP takes the issue of pension protection and reform very seriously—especially with respect to Canada’s signature pension plan, CPP. With major funds around the world contracting due to their over-exposure to equities and various forms of alternative investments, it is more important than ever to enact reforms as quickly as possible, and to promote transparency with respect to the management of pension fund assets.
The NDP critic for Pensions, Wayne Marston, has been pursuing the subject of pension reform on a variety of fronts. At his behest, the NDP Finance Critic, Tom Mulcair, submitted a motion before the House Standing Committee on Finance to hold hearings into the investment practises and long-term viability of CPP and other federally regulated pension plans. The motion was accepted and hearings will begin in late April.
As well, Mr. Marston has a private member’s bill presently being drafted that promotes transparency with respect to the investment practises of CPP fund investment managers. This bill will require the following measures:
- a statement on risk parameters for each investment and acceptable levels of risk for each investment; and
- a statement that disaggregates every investment made by the CPPIB, and provides the corresponding benchmarks used to measure the performance of those investments.
Mr. Marston has several other private members bills being drafted relating to varying dimensions of pension reform, as well.
As for your recommendations, thank you for providing them. Mr. Marston has submitted them directly to the Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty, and they are currently being reviewed by the Department of Finance.
Sincerely,
Malcolm Allen, M.P.
Welland
Malcolm on Anti-Scab Legislation: Protecting your right to strike!
April 2009
Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to rise on this in support of an anti-scab legislation, or at least a bill that proposes anti-scab. My background as a trade unionist means that I come with a certain bias, but I come with it very proudly and I wear it on my lapel. I have been involved in bargaining over the years. I understand when we have legislation that prohibits scabs from entering a workplace and when it does not.
I can say this from fact because at one point in my life I negotiated with police forces around what one would call strike protocol. Doing that is about ensuring the safety of everyone: the managers who want to go into that particular facility, the workers who are on strike or a lockout and the general public as a whole to make sure that they are going to be safe when they are around that particular situation. It can indeed affect the public and not just from the business perspective of selling a product or not. It may be close to a street or it may be busy.
When an employer decides to use scabs to enter a workforce that is being either locked out or struck, the potential for violence is set up. The police will say that they know that is what will happen. Consequently, it escalates a situation and takes it away from the bargaining process. It is really about bargaining. While the two entities are apart in their desires and how they intend to get there, they are nonetheless in a process where they are going to sit down and try to find an amenable situation where they can come to some sort of an agreement.
When this third leg is entered into the process, it makes the water murky and prohibits the bargaining process from going forward and concluding. The employer thinks they have the additional leg up and that they can exact what they need from their employees through this third leg when it comes to introducing scabs to the workplace. History has shown us what it has done. It has made strikes last longer. It has caused undue violence and hardship to all the parties concerned because not only are those scabs ostracized and afflicted with violence, but legitimate picketers are run down on the picket line by vehicles driven by those intent on getting scabs into a workplace.
I know my hon. colleague from the Bloc and I have proof of that. Not so many years ago in Chatham, a gentleman on a picket line was run over by a van driven by a security force hired by that company to try to get scabs into the workplace. It never succeeded in doing that. The company likes to call them “replacement” workers because it sounds like a really nice word. Since folks do not want to work, they decide to just replace them with someone else. What they really are in the vernacular are scabs. They are taking work and taking the bread and food off the tables of those hard workers who have been there for a long time.
That man was run over and seriously injured. To this day, he has never been able and will probably never be able to return to his work as an electrician. All he was doing was participating in a legal strike, no more and no less. He was not perpetrating violence on anyone. He was not doing what we would consider to be illegal, nor did the law see it to be illegal. He was involved in a legitimate picket. Yet, that group of individuals working for that security force took it upon themselves to drive that van through a group of people.
They did not drive through a barricade or the picket line barrels used to keep people warm in the winter. They drove through a group of people as if the van were a bowling ball and they were pins. They knocked this gentleman down and critically injured him, almost killing him. Unfortunately for him and his family, he has obviously not been able to return to work. He has suffered to have many operations done over the years because of a situation in Ontario where they permit the use of scabs and replacement workers.
If we were to pass this and get back to truly bargaining, the parties would actually understand that they had to bargain and that they had to get to a conclusion. Because what we have learned in the bargaining process for those of us who have intimate knowledge of it, for those of us who have done it, is that we eventually get to the end of that process. We get it resolved. We never win everything we want, but neither do we lose everything we think we are going to lose. At the end we actually have an agreement between the parties that allows those parties to continue forward, that company to flourish and those workers to be rewarded in the sense that they feel is justified.
However, when we have replacement workers, what enters into that process is that we have a process that now becomes very difficult. In fact, it is poison. After everything gets resolved, we have a poisoned atmosphere when the workers who went strike or who got locked out eventually return to work. They will still--and I will use my Conservative colleagues across the way as an example--be in the same place at the end of the day. What that means is they will still have to be working together at the end of the day. If we poison the atmosphere because we bring in scabs, that atmosphere remains poisoned for years in some situations, because folks do not forgive that easily when they have been left out in not just necessarily the cold but have been left in poverty because they have not been able to get back to work when indeed a bargaining process could have enabled that to happen.
So, we end up with this situation. It is available, and that is the real dilemma in all of this. It is an unnatural thing that we bring into the bargaining process. The times we see replacement workers, in nearly every instance, it is in a unionized workplace. I do not know of any other circumstances--and I will allow other members to perhaps teach me some history that I just maybe do not know--where we see replacement scab workers coming into a workplace that is non-unionized. It is only a target of those workplaces where the workers themselves, in a democratic process, have chosen to be organized and have chosen the union to represent them and have said to that employer that this is the group they wish to have speak for them. And yet, we as a government have the ability to make sure that level playing field happens again and that we do not have that third intrusion, which really is this gap.
So, when we talk about democratic rights, when we talk about human rights and when we talk about the rights to organize and bargain, this is a fundamental principle . If memory serves me right, there was an appeal to the charter about the rights to organize a union for a specific sector of workers and the charter spoke to that and said that they absolutely have the right.
I would suggest that what we need to see is the absolute right for the bargaining process to be allowed to continue to its fruition. Again, as I say, it will not always be perfect. The bargaining process never is. It is with opposing parties having opposing views trying to find resolution. However, what I do know is that the parties, especially when it comes to organized labour, understand and take their responsibility very seriously, they understand that taking their members out on strike will indeed cause great hardship on their members. They do not do it lightly.
I think if we had the ability to make sure that that process was not interrupted by replacement workers, we would absolutely find that process moved more quickly, came to better results, gave us more harmonious labour relations and, indeed, at the end of it, made sure that we did not see another gentleman like the one we saw in Chatham, who is maimed for life.
I think that is why we need to have this done. We need to support this bill. I would encourage all members in the House to support it because it really is about protecting workers, and I think that is what we all stand for.
Employment Insurance
13th March 2009
Mr. Speaker, I too present a petition today on behalf of the Canadian Auto Workers Union which has taken a great leadership role when it comes to the position on employment insurance. I thank those who have signed this petition asking for the types of reforms that the EI system needs to help those workers who at this point in their lives are the most vulnerable; those who are unemployed, and their families and their communities. Things like changing the hours rules, eliminating the two week period and the opportunity to try to get benefits in a more reasoned way and in a fairer way across the country. I commend the CAW for its leadership role and I think all of those who signed this petition. I would suspect we are going to see literally thousands upon thousands of these petitions from across the country because of the situation the unemployed find themselves in. I table this today.
January 28, 2009
Mr. Speaker, the government had a monumental moment in history to move Canada forward, an opportunity to provide Canadian families with a real sense of hope and stability. As we witnessed in the budget delivered yesterday and in the announcement by the Liberal Leader of the Opposition to join in supporting the Conservatives, this monumental moment has been lost. Thousands of Canadians have already lost their jobs this year and changes to employment insurance proposed by the government failed to provide the change needed to support and protect Canadian workers. Not one worker in my riding of Welland nor in the rest of this country will qualify for EI benefits because of the budget. After all, if workers cannot access the program, an extra five weeks of nothing is still nothing. The government, with the support of the Liberals, has chosen not to expand eligibility. It has chosen not to eliminate the waiting period. Together the Liberals and Conservatives have failed to provide stability and hope to the people of Canada. The Conservatives and Liberals have chosen to balance the books of employment insurance on the backs of Canadian workers. This is unacceptable and will not be supported by New Democrats.
February 2, 2009
Mr. Speaker, I would first like to thank my colleague from Acadie--Bathurst for seconding this bill. The purpose of this bill is to ensure that those hard-working Canadians who have been working all the time and are indeed entitled to severance pay, keep that severance pay. At a moment in time when every penny counts for hard-working Canadian families when they are laid off, it needs to continue to be in their hands. To take that money away from them before they are eligible to collect employment insurance is a travesty. It is an insurance plan that workers and their employers have paid into. It is not the benevolence of government that gives them money. It is their money that they are actually repatriating to themselves. The workers in my constituency of Welland are extremely hard hit by this economic downturn. In fact, this very day, Lakeside Steel has laid off 84 more workers and is closed for the entire week. Before all of their savings are gone, workers ought to be entitled to employment insurance, aand their severance packages and their pensions ought to be secure.
