[ Page 355 ]

CONTENTS

Routine Proceedings

Public Sector Restraint Act (Bill 3). Second reading.

Mr. Nicolson –– 355

Mr. Skelly –– 355

Mr. Lockstead –– 360

TUESDAY, JULY 19, 1983

The House met at 10:05 a.m.

Orders of the Day

HON. MR. GARDOM: I ask leave to proceed to public bills and orders.

Leave granted.

HON. MR. GARDOM: I call adjourned debate on second reading of Bill 3.

PUBLIC SECTOR RESTRAINT ACT

(continued)

MR. NICOLSON: We have with us today the Minister of Finance (Hon. Mr. Curtis), who since he has taken office has put British Columbia on the downside financially. He has taken a balance of $1,961 million — which accrued to him through the efforts of W.A.C. Bennett, Mr. Barrett, Mr. Stupich and Mr. Evan Wolfe — in 1979-80, combined as cash in the bank, liquid capital and also investment funds and special investments.... He has taken that money, and by the end of the fiscal year which we concluded on March 31 it was down to $542 million. He predicts that by the end of this year we will be over $1 billion in debt in that account. That is $3 billion, and this Minister of Finance, while he seeks to "terminate," by his choice of words, thousands of public sector employees — maybe 67,000 — does not even have the decency to submit his own resignation along with his admission of failure.

In Mexico you have the right for termination of employment relations: the following should be grounds for terminating the employment relations — five specific grounds are spelled out, and there are very detailed amounts. There is a lot that we could learn from other jurisdictions.

For that reason I would move that Mr. Speaker do now leave the chair for the purpose of the House resolving itself into a committee to examine the subject matter of the bill and to call for documents or witnesses, friendly or hostile, and that the business of the committee take precedence over all other business except introduction of bills, question period, routine business and Committee of Supply and that said committee report to the House with all due haste.

MR. SPEAKER: Hon. member, I'll need a moment before I determine if the motion itself is in order at this time.

Hon. members, it would greatly assist the Chair if the member could give the Chair the reference, or authority, for the somewhat unusual motion that has been presented in this case. If the member has such precedent the Chair would appreciate receiving same before ruling on the motion.

MR. NICOLSON: Mr. Speaker, I have taken a motion which is provided for, and that is that Mr. Speaker do now leave the chair, and I have reasoned that motion in order to give it a narrower scope for consideration.

MR. SPEAKER: Hon. members, the Chair can find no precedence for the type of motion presently before the House — that is, that the Speaker do now leave the chair — apart from the traditional motion of going into Committee of Supply. The motion, therefore, is not acceptable.

MR. NICOLSON: I challenge your ruling, Mr. Speaker.

[10:15]

Mr. Speaker's ruling sustained on the following division:

YEAS –– 29

NAYS — 15

Division ordered to be recorded in the Journals of the House.

MR. SPEAKER: Hon. members, during the course of a division, which is one of the most important proceedings in this House, it is important that members try to maintain some decorum while the lists are being read out. I would be most appreciative.

The member for Alberni.

MR. SKELLY: Are there no Socreds speaking on this issue, Mr. Speaker?

Interjections.

MR. SKELLY: I would be very pleased to leave the floor to the Minister of Forests (Hon. Mr. Waterland) or any other member from the government side who wishes to speak, without attempting to shut off the debate on this issue in their authoritarian way.

The Minister of Transportation and Highways (Hon. A. Fraser) said that we didn't want to work, because we wanted to put this bill into a committee where it could be discussed, where witnesses could be called. Yet that minister hasn't got up off his duff to defend this bill, nor have any of the back-benchers who were elected on the promise that they were going to Victoria to work for the electors in their riding. They have sat around reading Harlequin romances and newspaper articles and haven't done a thing in this House to defend this piece of authoritarian legislation, which any government.... I'm sure any one of those back-benchers is ashamed to even be identified with those pieces of legislation and that's why they're not standing up in this House to defend the legislation in the first place. Which one of you has got any guts at all to get up in this House and defend this legislation? It's absolutely shameful, Mr. Speaker, that none of these

[ Page 356 ]

government speakers is willing to defend this type of authoritarian legislation.

Interjection.

MR. SKELLY: Oh, we have one. Always willing to go beyond the deep end.

MR. SPEAKER: Order, please.

HON. MR. PHILLIPS: On a point of order, my understanding is that during second reading of the bill members are to speak to the intent of the bill and not to lecture the House on who's speaking. I would suggest that you draw that leadership candidate over there to order.

MR. SPEAKER: Hon. members are well aware of the rules of the House. I ask the member for Alberni to continue, bearing in mind the rules.

MR. SKELLY: Well, I'm pleased to hear that the Minister of Industry and Small Business Development is now aware of what's contained in the rule-books and, after your admonition, Mr. Speaker, I will try to draw myself directly to the principles of the legislation at hand.

[Mr. Strachan in the chair.]

It's a serious piece of legislation, the Public Sector Restraint Act, and yet the title seems not really to indicate what's contained in the act or give the real motivation for passing this act. The fact is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with restraint at all. If this is restraint legislation, then why do we see in the budget that the expenditures of this government are going to be increasing by something like 12.3 percent even though we're getting rid of something like 7,100 civil servants? Why in the budget do we see that the operating deficit of the province of British Columbia over the next fiscal year will be decreasing in spite of the fact that we're supposed to be getting rid of 7,100 hard-working civil servants? Why do they call this restraint legislation when they're laying off all of these 7,160 public employees, attempting to reduce the government employment staff of this province by 25 percent, and yet they're paying them for not working right up until October 31? Is that what this government's definition of restraint is?

The government said in the throne speech that they plan to eliminate 7,160 of their own employees in the manner outlined in the Public Sector Restraint Act. They also say that they plan to get rid of 25 percent of all the people working in the public sector in this province. As a previous speaker pointed out, that's taking 67,000 people away from employment in the public sector and putting them on the welfare or unemployment insurance rolls. The result is not just that those 67,000 people will end up unemployed or will end up as a burden on the community. Each one of those jobs has a spin-off component. Each one of those jobs finances, through the circulation of payrolls, several other jobs in the community. In fact, the relationship is sometimes said to be as much as two or three to one. So really, if we're talking about eliminating a quarter of the public sector in this province, we're talking about eliminating as many as 210,000 jobs in the province of British Columbia if those kinds of spin-off factors prevail. A quarter of a million people will be out of work as a result of this government's decision in this bill to lay off 25 percent of the total public sector. What will happen, Mr. Speaker?

In one of the reports of the B.C. Central Credit Union — I think it was back in April — they said that after retail sales, welfare and unemployment insurance was the second-highest payroll in British Columbia. This is one of the benefits that Social Credit government has brought to this province. Instead of mining being the second-largest industry, now welfare and unemployment is the second-largest payroll in the province of British Columbia. The effect of this legislation will be to double that payroll, in fact to make it the largest payroll in British Columbia. This is another way the Social Credit government has made the province of British Columbia a have-not province. It is another way that Social Credit has undermined this province's ability to recover from the economic recession, and another way this government has purposefully set out to wreck the economy of British Columbia so that it will never recover again. They're planning to get rid of — in a single stroke through this legislation — more jobs than they've ever created, or than have ever been created while they were government,

The B.C. Teachers' Federation, in discussing the elimination of school budgets, had an economist take a look at what the effect of this would be. A BCTF news release of March 25, 1983, said:

"The government's education cuts from August 1, 1982, to the end of this month will amount to $60 million. But Malcolmson's study indicates that the impact of these cuts in loss of income to people in communities throughout B.C. is doubled by the multiplier effect — the transfer of money from the original earner to others in the community through the purchase of goods and services. This means a loss of $86,760,000 in salaries and wages. Using an annual average wage of $16,298 for the wholesale and retail trades and business personal service sector, Malcolmson says that this means a loss of 5,323 jobs."

When we talk about the B.C. Place stadium, there would be, say, 5,000 jobs created selling hotdogs and peanuts, and cleaning up the place — none of them very skilled jobs. Government cutbacks in payrolls in the education sector have eliminated as many jobs as were created in the private sector by B.C. Place. But some of those education jobs were private sector jobs with skilled components. As a result, the 5,000 new jobs at B.C. Place, the biggest peanut stand in Canada, are totally wiped out by the number of jobs destroyed in the private sector as a result of the cutbacks in education costs. This government has no plan to create jobs in the British Columbia economy. Their plan is to destroy the economy, to erode its capability of recovery, to undermine its ability to restore itself to a vibrant, positive, contributing economy, and to keep us a have-not province for the rest of time. That's the Social Credit government plan for the economy of British Columbia. How can this government call this legislation a public sector restraint act, when in fact it has no effect on recovery at all except to delay, undermine and prevent that recovery for a long time? The bill is misnamed, Mr. Speaker.

[10:30]

The government claims they're trying to equalize the situation. Employees in the private sector suffer from marketplace controls, with bankruptcies, layoffs, redundancies due to technological change, and terminations due to changes in worldwide economic conditions. They've changed those

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to a newspeak term that they got directly from the Fraser propaganda institute. They call those "marketplace forces" or "market forces." They used to be called simply bankruptcies, layoffs, terminations and firings; now they're called marketplace forces. This government says that because of the nature of the public service in the province of British Columbia, those people who work in the public sector are not subject to those marketplace forces. But the simple fact is that over the last few years, as a result of this government's policy and failure to take any kind of positive action to revive the economy of British Columbia, thousands upon thousands of public sector employees have been sent down the road and have suffered from those very "marketplace forces" that affect the private sector employees.

Thousands have been laid off over the past few years from B.C. Hydro, a public sector employer. Thousands have been laid off from school districts, as a result of budget cutbacks, and from hospitals. In fact, we now have fewer people working in the hospital in Port Alberni than we had back in 1972, and we're getting chronic complaints about the cleaning and the services provided in that hospital. Municipalities have also laid off thousands of workers around the province, and layoffs have resulted in virtually every area of public sector employment. So the government cannot say that they need this legislation because public sector employees are insulated from the effects of economic recession in some special way. That simply is not a fact. They are just as vulnerable as private sector employees to layoffs during times of economic dislocation. They are just as vulnerable as the private sector to technological change and to decreasing revenues in the public sector, and therefore just as vulnerable to those so-called market forces — the term "market force" which has been developed by the Fraser propaganda institute to mean layoffs, terminations, firings and personal bankruptcies.

Why does this bill apply to school boards and local hospital boards? Is there any suggestion on the part of the government that these boards have been irresponsible in the way they've been operating throughout the years? Because these boards operate — or hopefully they operate — under the close and careful scrutiny of the ministers responsible in this Legislature. That's not always the case, as we see in the paper this morning. Governments have tendencies to spend an extra million dollars illegally here, an extra few million illegally there. The government doesn't seem to be exercising the control over its expenditures that its auditors would like.

We remember the time that a Minister of Tourism took the Royal Hudson and a private train and entourage on a tour of the United States, and lived in princely fashion down there, ostensibly promoting the tourist industry in British Columbia. It probably had absolutely no effect on the tourist industry in British Columbia, but it gave that minister the opportunity to travel around the United States in absolute princely luxury at the taxpayers' expense. Now that minister comes back into the Legislature and, even though she hasn't spoken on this bill, says: "Oh, well, I've had my fun — at the taxpayers' expense. I've dipped my snout into the public trough, and now it's time for the rest of the people in this province to cut back because of my overexpenditures and wasteful, princely living habits." Now it's time for the rest of the people in this province to cut back as a result of her overexpenditures and the fact that she had an opportunity to dip her snout in the public trough when times looked good for British Columbia.

There is absolutely no excuse for what this government has done to the economy of the province of B.C. There is absolutely no excuse for this type of legislation. There is absolutely no excuse for going back to those municipal governments, school boards, regional governments, hospital boards and Crown corporations to tell them that they've got to act in the same way as the provincial government does, by sacking workers without cause, without concern for seniority, and without concern for the service that they provided to the people of this province; by ordering forced transfers of these workers to other places in the province; and by ordering changes in job description — without any possible recourse by those workers — in order to increase the likelihood of sacking those workers. There is no excuse for this legislation being applied to municipalities who have been acting responsibly.

The only excuse I can possible think of.... A lot of people have been quoting fascist legislation recently, and speeches by fascist personalities from back in the 1930s. This reminds me of one of Adolf Hitler's speeches to the Reichstag back in 1933, where he said that in order for the local governments to fall in line with the national aspirations of the state and the people, as expressed through the Nazi Party, he would impose the authority of the national government on those local governments, and they would have no choice. In this legislation we see a clear indication of where this government, with its neo-Nazi tendencies, is forcing those local governments to give up the authority that was granted in statutes far back in history, and that has been exercised responsibly. Now, if any local government refuses to follow the guidelines, the legislation laid down in this statute, each member of that government is liable to a fine of $2,000 for not following the orders of the central government.

MR. REID: It's called leadership and restraint.

MR. SKELLY: To respond to that shot across the floor from the member who doesn't have the jam to stand up and debate in this Legislature, and whose partners don't have the jam to stand up and speak on this bill, it's not called leadership and restraint; it's called dictatorship. Pure and simple dictatorship, where the central government of this province has imposed its will on local governments, and those local governments who refuse to toe the line can be fined $2,000. A $2,000 fine for everyone who refuses to toe this government's line. Those local governments used to be considered the farm team for Social Credit. Now the farm team is certainly being brought into line. If you don't do what you're told and follow the orders of the fuehrer, you're going to be fined $2,000. They're creating a system of fear among local governments — if they don't fire their employees, treat their employees like dirt, they're going to be fined $2,000. We've set up a system where the local government authority has been destroyed and where any courageous local government personage, anyone elected by the local electors who refuses to toe the central government's line, could end up being fined or possibly even jailed for failure to follow the orders of the leader of the provincial government. This is dictatorship, pure and simple.

It's interesting to note some of the other tactics followed by this government during the last election and the last legislative session. They were fascist tactics, especially their way of dealing with the public service of this province. What you do is create a group of people for other people to hate.

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You isolate one section of society and attempt, through your propaganda organizations, to imbue these people with characteristics that they don't ordinarily have, or don't have. You create the impression that they're greedy or lazy, that they don't do the job they're supposed to be doing, or that they're hindering the process of the nation, in exactly the same way as a fascist government did to certain racial and national groups prior to 1938. It's exactly what this government is doing with public sector employees in this province. They're creating the impression that these people are not first-class citizens; that they're living off the fat of the land, are greedy and lazy, and are impeding the exercise of the provincial or national will as expressed through the Social Credit Party.

In saying that these people aren't susceptible or vulnerable to market forces, they're trying to divide them from the other workers of the province of British Columbia, the so-called private sector workers. We're saying that these people are greedy, lazy and have special privileges, whereas private sector employees are hard-working, contributing positively, producing the wealth of this province, and that they are subject to those rigorous market forces that result in layoffs, firings and terminations, and bankruptcies. So you've set them apart — two separate groups of workers with two separate groups of benefits. It's a fascist tactic that goes back for years, back to the thirties, the twenties. Set apart a group that everybody can hate. Ghettoize this group that everybody can hate, and that's your key to electoral success. Divide the public and say that these people are something less than human beings, whereas the rest of us are something more; then you use that section of the public to pass your enabling statutes in order to take control of the provincial government and the provincial economy.

This attacks a group of people who have, in the past, been inspired to go into public service as a legitimate career objective. It attacks a group of people who have seen education as a legitimate social objective, a group of people who have seen nursing and health care as a legitimate social objective. It's attacking a group of people who have seen nursing and health care as a legitimate social objective, It's attacking people who have seen financial support and counselling, even working in prisons, as a legitimate social objective. It's attacking every one of those people who were encouraged over the past 20 or 30 years to see public service as a legitimate career objective. Those people were encouraged in schools, universities and colleges — in fact, encouraged by members of this Legislature — to follow that goal of public service because it was a legitimate career objective. Now we've taken one section of society — those who, following our requests, have followed those career goals of public service — and we're now saying that those people are second-class citizens, greedy and lazy, that the services they provide are useless and that therefore we should snuff out 25 percent of them because they interfere with and impede the goals of this economy as established by its leader, the leader of the Social Credit Party. It's a fascist tactic, pure and simple, and on that basis alone we should reject this bill.

[10:45]

The Social Credit Party has never held public service in high regard, and in fact it was the speech of that member who occasionally barks out from his seat — the second member for Surrey (Mr. Reid) — which made that perfectly clear in this Legislature. They have never held public service in high regard, and that's one of the problems.

It reminds me of a story, Mr. Speaker. When we became government in the province of B.C. back in 1972-73 we found that this building had fallen to rack and ruin. This building is quite a tourist attraction, and it has a tremendous historical significance. Some of you on the other side may not recognize the significance, because it has a significance to the type of government and the type of democracy that we've enjoyed in this province for many years. But for many people — for at least 45 percent of the people in this province — it does have that significance. They see it as the institution of democracy, as something to be preserved, to visit, as almost a Mecca to make a pilgrimage to. Yet the previous Social Credit government had allowed it to fall to rack and ruin. There were places in this building where the walls had been scabbed up with sheets of plywood, windows had been removed and covered with plywood — it was no attraction at that time. What we did, as a government that believed in democracy, was say that we should allow people to come in here to see this building as a symbol of democracy and of the rights and freedoms that they enjoy. So we began a renovation of the parliament buildings, and it's taken a long time. It was a pleasure when Her Majesty the Queen came through earlier this year to place a plaque in the building and to see the work that had been done over a period of two governments to bring the building back to its proper standard. But that was started under the NDP government, Mr. Speaker, and one of the first things we did was redo the offices of the ministers and to move some of the other functions away from the parliament building so that it would strictly be serving the government and the legislative function.

At one time the NDP government renovated the office of the first minister and changed it so that it looked a little more respectable than it did in previous times, and when that renovation was complete we opened that office so that the people in the reconstruction and renovation could come in and take a look at it. We invited in the cleaning staff, the workers who had taken part in the reconstruction and renovation of the office, and the MLAs. The cleaning staff felt very uncomfortable there, and we asked them what the problem was. They said: "We've never been in the same office as the Premier; in fact, we were never even allowed in the halls of the building when the Premier was walking through the halls." They were always treated as something subhuman, less than real people, and the halls of the building had to be cleared by that former Premier before he would allow himself to walk through them.

HON. A. FRASER: Phooey to you.

MR. SKELLY: It's true. Talk to those people themselves and they'll tell you that they were always treated as second-class citizens by Social Credit.

HON. A. FRASER: It's all malarkey.

MR. SKELLY: If you want to argue about this, get up in the House. Have the courage to get up in the House and argue this bill. You've always treated the public employees of this province as second-class citizens. What you've done in this legislation is ghettoized them. You've treated them as something less than human beings, not because they are but because your political objectives require that they be ghettoized, be reduced to something that the general public can hate and detest in order to achieve your political objective of

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dividing this province and creating leadership for Social Credit.

The public employees of this province have always been treated as less than human beings by this government, and this legislation is no exception. In fact this legislation is the culmination of that. We don't even need this legislation, Mr. Speaker, as I pointed out. There are provisions in the collective agreements of the public service unions. There are collective agreements in municipalities and collective agreements signed between teachers and school boards, as you well know. When programs are terminated when the government is downsizing its operations, through negotiations with those public employees, teachers, and employees in Crown corporations, the size of the staff complement can be reduced through negotiation and consultation under the terms of the collective agreement. Those terms are contained in the agreement that this government has with its own government employees.

We should talk, first of all, about how this collective agreement came about. We didn't even have one of these until the NDP came to office, until the fall of 1973 when we brought down the Public Service Labour Relations Act. We had a study into it called...

AN HON. MEMBER: An open chequebook.

MR. SKELLY: ...the Carrothers study. It was done by the W.A.C. Bennett Social Credit government. Call it what you will, but it was certainly no open chequebook at that time. I worked for the public service at that time, Mr. Speaker. I was a prison guard. I did essential work.

MS. BROWN: You guys have never worked a day in your lives.

MR. SKELLY: That's right. I was paid $275 a month in 1965.

MR. REID: And you were overpaid at that.

Interjections.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order, please.

MR. SKELLY: The Minister of Industry is going off the deep end again, Mr. Speaker. He hasn't been getting his messages from Doug Heal again, or he hasn't been reading them.

Back in 1957 the government promised to investigate the operation of the Public Service Act in British Columbia. One of the recommendations that came out of the Carrothers report that was published in January 1959 was that there should be a provision for collective bargaining between the government and its employees. What happened to the Carrothers report? This gives you an idea of just what the feeling is that Social Credit has for its employees.

Did the NDP find the Carrothers report in the library when we took office, where we find most royal commission reports? This one was called a report of a board of reference. Did we find it in the library? No, it wasn't in the library, Mr. Speaker. Did we find it in the archives? After all, it was getting pretty old by 1972, and there was no collective agreement between the public service of the province and the province as employer. Did we find it in the archives? No, it wasn't in the archives either. This was a document that was paid for out of taxpayers' dollars, and it should have been published so that everybody in the province would have had an opportunity to review it and so that the employees would have had an opportunity to review it.

Once it went to cabinet and they saw that public sector employees should be treated as any other employees in the province and have the right to bargain collectively, to lodge grievances and to go through all those procedures that those outside the marketplace forces have to contend with, along with those same benefits that should be enjoyed by the government service, what did the government do with this document for 13 years? They buried it. It didn't see the light of day. We tried to find the Carrothers report when we became government to see if it provided any kind of basis for fair negotiations with the public employees of the province of British Columbia. Where did we find it? We found it buried in the house of a defeated cabinet minister, Wesley Black, the former Provincial Secretary under the W.A.C. Bennett government. They were so afraid of this document becoming public knowledge that the one copy was buried in the house of a defeated cabinet minister somewhere in Victoria, and we had to go to that cabinet minister and get the document before we were able to fulfil our promise of setting up negotiations and collective bargaining with the public service in the province of British Columbia.

There are provisions in the collective agreement that we have between the public employees of this province and the province as the employer which allow the government to downsize its operations, terminate certain programs and do what the government has to do within the constraints of its budgetary picture. Those provisions are already contained in the collective agreement that we've signed with our public sector employees. Section 10(2), which has probably already been quoted in this House, says: "A minister or deputy minister may dismiss any employee for just cause. Notice of dismissal shall be in writing and shall set forth the reasons for dismissal."

Certainly you have to go through some consultative processes, fair processes, that were developed in tough negotiations between public employees and the government as an employer. The government has been doing it this way. We have been downsizing public sector employment through this very mechanism. Why then, Mr. Speaker, does the government want the right to terminate without just cause? Why do they want the right to transfer people in the province without their agreement? Why does the government want all these dictatorial rights over public servants when they already have provisions in the collective agreement?

I agree exactly with what the other speakers have been saying: the government wants to go through what Premier Devine of Saskatchewan is currently going through. They want the power to be able to look through the civil service, pick out those people who hold embarrassing political views and fire them. They want to find people in the public service who held contrary political views and, through their hit list, fire those people. They want to find a government servant who perhaps took a soil analysis of the Spetifore property and found that it shouldn't be taken out of the agricultural land reserve and, if he speaks out, to fire that government servant for providing the information that he was hired to provide in the first place.

This bill is absolutely unnecessary; it's totally dictatorial. It's more worthy of a fascist or neo-Nazi government than it is

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of a government in the province of British Columbia, a supposedly democratic government. It's more worthy of the likes of Jim Keegstra or some national Social Credit functionary who has, beneath his philosophy, some kind of underlying racist point of view.

The fact that this legislation cannot be supported is evidenced by the fact that there is not one back-bencher in this Social Credit caucus willing to stand up and defend this legislation in the House. Not one of them is willing to stand up without stifling debate, without closing off debate. The Provincial Secretary (Hon. Mr. Chabot) should be instructing the back-benchers in this government to stand up in the House and justify what this Provincial Secretary is doing, rather than attempting to close off debate. Instead, they've been following orders. They have been told to keep their mouths shut and to sit back and do nothing while the government, through its leaders, passes this legislation which destroys public service in the province of British Columbia, undermines our chances for recovery in this province and creates hundreds of thousands more unemployed, not simply in the public sector but also in the private sector of our economy. It's dangerous, dictatorial legislation and has absolutely nothing to do with restraint. For that reason, Mr. Speaker, I am voting against it.

I move the adjournment of this debate until the next sitting of the House.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Motion negatived on the following division:

[11:00]

YEAS — 21

NAYS — 30

Division ordered to be recorded in the Journals of the House.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: Mr. Speaker, I was hesitating because I thought we might have some Social Credit member get up and defend this bill. I see the Premier is leaving the chamber. I thought the Premier might get up.

AN HON. MEMBER: How about Waterland?

MR. LOCKSTEAD: The Minister of Forests (Hon, Mr. Waterland) appears to be ready to speak out and defend this bill. He's probably going to have that opportunity in 15 or 20 minutes when I complete my presentation, so stay in the House, Mr. Minister.

I'm surprised that some of the very vocal back-benchers.... They're hurling interjections across....

HON. MR. PHILLIPS: Speak to the principle of the bill.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: You have no principle over there. Come on!

Interjections.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: I was just about to point out that these members across the floor are very good at interjecting from their seats, but they won't get up to defend this bill. And there's a good reason for that. They can't get up because there's nothing to defend in this bill. I'm going to give you some of those reasons as soon as the minister of economic development in Ocean Falls takes his seat.

HON. MR. PHILLIPS: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker, I would suggest that we should remind the member of the opposition who is presently speaking that he sought the floor to debate the principle of the bill, and that he should stick to that principle. It's a well-known rule of the House that in second reading of any bill we speak to the principle of the bill.

MR. COCKE: Mr. Speaker further to the minister's point of order, the minister knows full well that when he spends all his time in his seat, upbraiding the member who is endeavouring to speak.... With that minister's voice being loud and carrying as well as it does, naturally it interrupts the train of thought of the member speaking. So under those circumstances, Mr. Speaker, I would suggest that the minister use his time to take his place, if he dares, at the earliest opportunity, but certainly that opportunity isn't at the moment.

MR. SPEAKER: Thank you for two excellent points.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'll try not to be too inflammatory.

I've been in this House for almost 11 years — would you believe it?

HON. MR. WATERLAND: Too long!

MR. LOCKSTEAD: The member over there says "too long." Well, I expect to be here another 11 years, and on the government side.

In those 11 years this is by far the most serious legislation that I have seen come before this House. In my view, this bill is part of an overall package that will literally undermine the very basis of the democratic parliamentary system as we know it here in British Columbia and possibly in Canada. The hard-won rights of working people.... I was one of those working people, although I was not one of those who lost their job because they belonged to a political party or joined a union. Many older people whom I know, particularly in the community of Powell River.... I'm straying a bit from my notes, but would you believe, Mr. Speaker, that the old Powell River Co. actually fired people for belonging to a

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political party, which at that time was the CCF? They had to have their meetings in a little cabin up Powell Lake. The company sent its spies to those meetings, and those people were arbitrarily fired for belonging to a political party.

We're dealing with this bill, when I'm talking about this, because under this legislation this is the kind of thing that could happen again. They had their little meetings, and the company had spies at that time, which was 1934-35.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: Oh, that recently?

MR. LOCKSTEAD: But this is the kind of thing we are reverting to, Mr. Minister of Lands. This is the kind of thing that can happen under this legislation.

It's interesting that until the Ocean Falls operation was shut down.... One fellow who had worked there from 1934 to 1978 was actually fired from the Powell River Co. for political reasons, and worked in Ocean Falls until he retired. Of course, everybody is going to be retired shortly in Ocean Falls, as we all know.

MR. REID: Would you have kept that plant open?

[Mr. Veitch in the chair.]

MR. LOCKSTEAD: That member was not in the House when we went through the Ocean Falls situation. We're going through it again in some detail when the bill comes before this House. I just want to remind that member — I'm sure he doesn't know this; and when he hears it he won't believe it, because that's the way they operate — that operation showed a profit, made money for the people of this province, from 1972 to 1976. It's only when your government came into power that they started to lose money with their mismanagement. That's when that corporation started to lose money. You ask the Minister of Industry and Small Business Development (Hon. Mr. Phillips) ; he'll tell you the truth.

A number of speakers before me on this bill discussed people who have lived and died and gone to work to protect the human rights of all of us in this country and province. In my view, this bill undermines those very human rights. I don't believe that government was elected to wipe out the human and civil rights of this province. I don't believe they told the truth during the last election campaign. I was trying to avoid those words. I normally don't — at least inside this House — use words like that. Outside I use them a lot. I don't think they were candid with the people of this province when they went around in that recent election campaign telling us all that.... Of course, there was no hint of this type of legislation. In fact, when it was charged that the government was going to raise user fees, they said: "No, definitely not." They told the electors: "No way. The NDP is being shrill and hollering wolf; we won't increase user fees." What did they do? They're increasing user fees in many areas, hospitals being one of the major areas where user fees are being increased.

Sales tax. I recall very well during the recent election campaign when the Premier said to members of the press that there would be no increase in taxes in this province. Yet here we are with bills before this House to increase sales tax and many other taxes. Who can you believe? It's very difficult. Well, I've made up my mind.

[11:15]

The Minister of Forests is in the House. I'm not going to dwell on this right now because I'll be discussing it in great detail under his estimates, but did the Minister of Forests, for example, go around this province telling people that they're going to cut back on forestry programs, silviculture, site preparation? I'm told by one of the major forestry associations here in British Columbia, or have read, that we have some 1 million hectares — about 2.5 million acres — of unprepared, implanted silviculture areas in this province that require tree planting and all these things, We weren't told that during their recent election campaign. If we were, I didn't hear it. In my riding that one program has affected approximately 250 jobs in forestry alone that I'm aware of. People should be out there now, thinning and planting and doing these kinds of things. In fact, just last week in the Sechelt region 20 full-time forest workers were laid off.

HON. MR. PHILLIPS: Speak to the bill.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: This is part of the bill: arbitrary layoffs which you can't justify by any legislation that has yet been passed in this House. How are these people being laid off? Under what authority? People with a lot of seniority — this bill deals exactly with that. If I were allowed I'd read the section, but you can't do that in second reading. We're discussing the principle of this bill, which is very difficult to do because this bill has no principle. In any event, 20 people were laid off in that one little district alone in anticipation that this bill will eventually pass. Maybe not; we're going to fight it all the way, right down to the wire.

That party has reverted, in spite of what they told us in the last election campaign, to right-wing extremism in its worst form. I know stronger terms have been used in this House, and the Speaker has allowed those terms to be used, because I know, Mr. Speaker, that you're aware that what we're saying in the opposition here is correct. But I'm not using those words, I'm just saying that right-wing extremism, at this point, has now taken over in this province. The cabinet, and certainly the back bench.... It's one-man, one-person rule out of the Premier's office, with his flacks from out of the province using tactics that are destroying this province and will throw it into disarray over the next several years. There's no question about that.

Even the federal Conservatives are now running for cover. That party sent delegates to the last Conservative leadership convention, as I understand it. I don't think they were allowed to vote, but they had people there campaigning for one or the other of the major leadership delegates.

MRS. WALLACE: How can you tell a Socred from a Conservative?

MR. LOCKSTEAD: Well, it's very difficult.

But what is happening now is that even their own comrades — their federal comrades, the federal Conservative Party — are running for cover, attempting to dissociate themselves from this government. But the federal Conservatives, of course, won't get away with it, because they've already made public statements which, in some oblique way, support what this government is trying to do — they haven't got away with it yet, Mr. Speaker.

MS. BROWN: It's just a pilot project for the federal Conservatives.

[ Page 362 ]

MR. LOCKSTEAD: Probably. I wouldn't be surprised, and we'll see.

This proposed legislation has drawn interest from people all over Canada. Politicians and newspapers are deeply concerned. A newspaper like the Globe and Mail.... And everybody knows where the Globe and Mail is located — it's not in this province, published....

HON. MR. PHILLIPS: That's Broadbent's paper, is it?

MR. LOCKSTEAD: No, I think it was a Conservative paper, basically, at one point anyway, essentially supporting your party, Mr. Member.

I want to quote from this article in the Globe and Mail. I know that the members here are aware of this, but I want to quote from it so that my constituents, when they read Hansard and our local paper, will have some idea of what other people in Canada have deduced, and the conclusions they've come to. It's from the Globe and Mail, dated July 13 — I say this for the sake of Hansard —and an article by Ian Mulgrew.

HON. MR. PHILLIPS: Who?

MR. LOCKSTEAD: It will be in Hansard.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: The Globe and Mail, that's all we really have to know.

He says, in part of his article: "The Premier, William Bennett, claims all the changes in the 26 bills were cost cutting measures, but an examination shows many of the changes will save little, and others will save nothing. Moreover, the targets of the legislation are invariably the people who are already shouldering the burden of the recession, or minorities." That's one of the things he says. I'll just pause here for a minute, Mr. Speaker, because I do believe that during the course of the debate on the budget I pointed out to the government that the budget that they had introduced — with this accompanying legislation — the pretext under which this legislation was introduced, was in the name of so-called restraint.

I'd like the Provincial Secretary or any one of those people, when they get up in their turn to speak in this debate — which will probably never happen, because they find it difficult to defend this legislation — to explain to us how firing — that's what it is, not termination, not dismissal, but firing — without legislation that we're aware of in this House today, which hasn't been passed, is going to help the economy. Just tell me. Legal Aid? Where are those people going to end up? It is costing somebody — the taxpayers — money when they can't get due justice and advice through the normal legal aid channels. They'll end up in the courts. We'll end up with more people in our jails — even, probably, as occasionally happens, people who should not be there. But that's where they'll end up, because they won't have the proper defence and advice from authorities like Legal Aid, Civil Liberties, and those types of organizations.

It is a false economy that this government is perpetrating. When they tell us they're bringing in this kind of a bill in the name of restraint, nobody believes that any more.

In the Globe and Mail the columnist goes on to say:

"In the labour ministry women's programs and safety services were also axed. Job retraining was cut. Shelter aid to the elderly was pared. The Forests ministry slashed its reforestation program."

I already spoke about that.

"The environment ministry lowered its fish management, pesticide control, water management and wildlife management departments. Special education programs were cut, the Criminal Injury Compensation Act was trimmed and post-secondary education programs lost $2.2 million. The rentalsman was eliminated, The Consumer and Corporate Affairs complaint-handling department was wiped out. The Education minister has claimed the power to dictate what courses will be taught in the universities, to decide what the role of the institutions will be and to decide what courses they must recognize and honour. In other words, they stripped away autonomy from school boards, municipalities.... "

I haven't counted them, but there would appear to be a list of some thirty institutions which are in effect losing their autonomy.

"I can come to no other conclusion than that this government is deliberate in its attempt to undermine human, civil, social, economic and trade union rights in this province — at least for a large majority of the people in this province."

What's your next program over there? Is it to bring in legislation applying to trade unionists in the private sector? Are they going to be faced somewhere along the way in this session with the same type of legislation, stripping the rights of all these people? We've been told, Mr. Speaker....

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order, hon. member. You're well aware that you can't contemplate legislation while debating the principle of a bill that is currently before the House.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: It was my understanding, Mr. Speaker, that such legislation is currently being drafted.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Hon. member, you can't contemplate new legislation, only the legislation you have before you.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'll accept your advice. But just the same, they're going to do it.

What this bill is in effect asking us in this House to do is support their local firing squads.

Interjections.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: Yes, that's what they're asking us to do. Support your local firing squads. They have in every community now an apparatus whereby people have been designated — government agents.... Their local sheriff? The RCMP? I don't know who. I believe the newspaper columns I read. The newspapers are correct, aren't they? They tell us RCMP officers are out there chasing down public servants through the bush, at their homes — sneaking in. They're probably even coming down chimneys, for all I know — giving them their pink slips. No matter if there are birthday parties, family dinners on Sunday night — they're just swooping in and giving them their pink slips. Under what authority? Under the statutes of British Columbia? We don't know. This bill hasn't passed. It's going to be some time before it passes. So support your local firing squad. That's what this bill is telling us.

[ Page 363 ]

Now to the bill. Mr. Speaker, I've made some notes and done some research, and I want to speak briefly on some of these matters. I know that this information I'm about to read is pretty well known to members in this House, but I want my constituents, when they read Hansard and our local paper, to understand exactly what is happening out there.

HON. MR. PHILLIPS: They'll never understand it from what you're saying.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: Oh, they'll understand it. They'll understand it when they start getting their pink slips. A lot of them already have, Mr. Minister. In fact, one whole community was axed by the stroke of a pen, just a couple of days ago.

AN HON. MEMBER: Speak to the bill.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: Okay. This bill applies to approximately 250,000 public sector workers under the jurisdiction of the provincial government — public service, Crown corporations, boards, commissions, municipalities, regional districts, school boards, hospitals, colleges, institutions, universities. The list goes on and on under schedule A of the bill. The ferry workers have more legislation against them at this time than any other public service body in British Columbia. They are currently under the jurisdiction of the Labour Code of British Columbia and under the Essential Service Disputes Act. This government is discussing bringing in a bill to prevent strikes on B.C. Ferries. They already have that jurisdiction anyway, if they wanted to utilize it.

I might digress a bit and remind the House that the longest strike that ever took place in the B.C. ferry service was when they did not have the right to strike. Since the workers in the B.C. Ferry Corporation had the right to strike, there has only been a one-day strike against that corporation. However, that's not quite on the bill.

This bill allows for the termination of employees without cause, notwithstanding the provisions of the Labour Code and the Public Service Labour Relations Act. This bill, as well, means the effective end of seniority, no layoff clauses in public sector collective agreements, and an end to arbitration over dismissal with just cause, and so on. In other words, anybody can be fired at any time for any reason, seniority or not.

[11:30]

Cabinet may make regulations regarding the implementation of terminations and criteria for termination within subunits of employees. There are two key points in this. The criteria for dismissal are permissive and not defined, so the bill gives the cabinet a blank cheque to fire at will. It really upsets me, Mr. Speaker that in the privacy and secrecy of the cabinet room the cabinet will draw up, after this bill has gone through — if it passes — regulations to arbitrarily dismiss anyone without cause and possibly without compensation.

Interjection.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: We don't know that, Mr. Provincial Secretary. Where is that spelled out in this six-page bill? It gives cabinet total discretion in doing what they wish. After 30 or 40 years of service, competence won't matter.

This legislation also effectively places nominally independent public bodies under the tutelage of the cabinet, as I just pointed out.

[Mr. Strachan in the chair.]

There's another part of this bill which disturbs me greatly and that hasn't, I don't think, been mentioned in here. "A deputy minister may exercise all of the powers of government under this act." What does that mean? We'll discuss it more thoroughly when we're dealing with section by section debate on this bill, but....

Interjection.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: No, it's a very basic principle that we're discussing: a deputy minister, who is usually an order-in-council appointee of the government, having all of the powers....

HON. MR. CHABOT: Nonsense!

MR. LOCKSTEAD: The minister says nonsense. You know very well, Mr. Minister, that that is so. Then why is this section in here? If it's nonsense, why is it in here? Part of the reason, I believe, is that some of you cabinet ministers are so busy flying and travelling around the world and putting in expense accounts. We have a case history of one cabinet minister collecting expense claims a number of times for the same trip. It's well documented in the report tabled in this House yesterday. So you're going to be too busy travelling around the world, going to Hawaii, and playing golf, and you're going to have the deputy make all the decisions. He might give you a phone call before he signs the writ. This is a very, very unusual part and principle of any piece of legislation in my time in this House: giving a deputy minister total and full powers of government. The minister, I'm sure, has made a note and will explain this section when we get to that point in the debate of this bill — presumably sometime around the end of August.

HON. MR. CHABOT: Is that a threat?

MR. LOCKSTEAD: No, it's a promise, if they can hold out that long.

Interjection.

MR. LOCKSTEAD: Might be, but I hope not.

Anyway, Mr. Speaker, presumably the criteria can and will be made specific to the particular employee or group of employees, and we will see specific regulations for school boards, colleges, B.C. Hydro, and on and on. How can these bodies that are listed in Appendix A of this bill effectively at this time carry on their operations when they have the threat of this bill hanging over their heads? They don't know who's going to be there next week or when the RCMP or government agents are going to swoop. Are you going to remove Mr. Bonner arbitrarily? Is he going to be gone next week? I don't know, but it could well be under this bill. However, in his case I doubt it.

This leads me to another far more serious point. For the reasons I outlined above, the government will now have the power and the authority — when this bill passes, because they

[ Page 364 ]

don't have that authority yet, Mr. Speaker — to fire people. Well, they don't use the word "fire" over there; they use the words "termination" and "dismissal." They don't have jobs, but they're not fired. For any reason at all — for political reasons, for union activities, because they don't like the color of their skin or eyes or because they don't like their religion, or because they're handicapped — people can be arbitrarily and summarily dismissed. It leads me to wonder — and I know that this has been mentioned before in this House — if the government does in fact have a hit list. I know the government has denied this allegation, but how are they going to pick and choose? Would the Premier, for example, request of the Provincial Secretary that a certain relative who is now a government agent in Kelowna be terminated? I doubt that very much. But if they have decided to terminate five or ten people in that office, you can rest assured that the friend and shirt-tail relative of the Premier won't be one of them; it's going to be somebody else. Maybe an employee who has 15, 20, 25 or 30 years of service, and who may have voted Social Credit in the last election, arbitrarily cut off at the knees. Does the government have a hit list? I suspect there is some kind of a list hidden away in some lower drawer, probably in the Premier's office. If he's lucky, I would guess the Provincial Secretary has a copy of that list.

Certainly this will effectively choke off any political activity by public employees. Government employees should have that right, but they will be afraid of losing their jobs. That's why they won't engage in these activities, or will have to do as they did 35 or 45 years ago in Powell River — sneak around and have meetings secretly in basements and little halls.

As I said before, the Social Credit government did not campaign in favour of destroying public sector unions. Indeed, their references to restraint made it clear that they saw wage restraint as a means of keeping the majority of public servants in their jobs. This is what they told employees. In the last election campaign they did not tell them they would take away their human, civil and trade union rights; they waited until the election was over. I think that was misleading the public during the campaign.

One thing I meant to mention a bit earlier is particularly for the benefit of the back-benchers, I would guess. I know what it's like to be a new member in this House. They perhaps have not read the legislation thoroughly or had it analyzed in some detail, and they really don't understand what they are voting on and what this bill is all about in terms of human and civil rights. But if they have, this compounds the event, the crime, by many, many fold. If they do understand what they are voting on and still support it, this really compounds the event. I do not feel I was elected to take part in the destruction of the democratic system as it has evolved and been practised in this province and this nation over the last hundred years. I was elected to uphold the hard-fought traditions and rights of people in this province; therefore, I will fight and oppose this bill in this Legislature, in my office, in communities throughout this province; we all will, in every electoral district in this province and ultimately on the streets and on the lawns of this Parliament if necessary. We will oppose the bill, and we will fight.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to spend a couple of minutes on another matter. Then the Minister of Forests (Hon. Mr. Waterland) is finally going to get up and defend this bill. I will be listening with a great deal of interest.

I took the trouble to do a bit of research and read Hansard from 1973 onward, when we were the government of this province. I was interested to see what the Social Credit members at that time had to say, particularly about a vicious fight that we had over a certain land bill, which is of course now in jeopardy as well under this government. That was Bill 42, the agricultural land reserve. It was interesting to see how the freedom-fighters of that day got up in this House one after the other. Some of those members are sitting across from me in this House at the moment: the Provincial Secretary (Hon. Mr. Chabot); the Minister of Intergovernmental Relations (Hon. Mr. Gardom), who was a Liberal at that time; the Minister of Economic Development (Hon. Mr. Phillips). He had a long speech. It seemed like it was about 28 days long, but I think it was about 28 hours, that filibuster. It was hard reading in Hansard. The speeches of the Minister of Agriculture (Hon. Mr. Schroeder) were all very interesting. Those members, and more, got up hour after hour in this House to defend, as they put it, the rights and freedoms in this House under what they termed as repressive legislation under Bill 42 at that time. They said we were going to take people's farms and take their children and sell them into slavery, I think was said at one point in the year. It was just ridiculous. Anyway, they were essentially, they said, fighting for human rights and for the freedom of people in this province.

I'm not going to quote them all, but I just want to quote one very brief statement from the then official Leader of the Opposition, Mr. W.A.C. Bennett, who said on March 28, 1973, on page 1793 of Hansard:

"In public life such as ours, in a democracy such as ours, where people are supposed to govern themselves, Mr. Speaker, you know so well that they all can't come to the Legislature, so they delegate that power to certain duly elected representatives, but when these duly elected representatives hear the people who have the real power speak out so clearly that they are all confused about this bill, the best you can say about it is that thousands and thousands — and we know this to be true in this particular bill are against it...."

[11:45]

Nearly everybody in the province has some trust and faith in the people who are elected to this legislative assembly. He was telling us all that he believed in true democracy. This bill will take away that right — the right of democracy in this Legislature. I don't know what else to say, except that we will fight this bill. We will oppose it with every means at our disposal, and I therefore move adjournment of this debate until the next sitting of the Legislature.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Motion approved unanimously on a division.

Hon. Mr. Gardom moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

The House adjourned at 11:51 p.m.