What you missed in that budget bill

The Toronto Star
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Page: IN01
Section: Insight
Byline: Thomas Walkom
Source: Toronto Star

Those worried about Stephen Harper changing his spots can rest easy. At heart, the prime minister's the same old guy. True, he now plans to run big deficits to fight the economic slump.

But Harper is also using the opportunity provided by this slump to quietly ram through laws that punish two groups his governing Conservatives have long had in their sights - public sector workers and uppity women.

At the same time, he is quietly introducing measures to weaken environmental laws affecting rivers and lakes, limit federal oversight of most foreign investment and scale back some of Canada's few remaining restrictions on foreign ownership.

All are part of the government's so-called budget implementation Bill C-10. Most were mentioned barely, if at all, in the Jan. 27 budget that gave rise to this bill.

Still, thanks to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, every one is bound to pass. Ignatieff has pledged that his caucus will support the budget and any bills flowing from it.

Overall, Bill C-10 provides an insight into how a sly government can use the economic crisis to quietly slip through measures that have little or nothing to do with the problem at hand.

In this case, the Conservative attack on pay equity - the idea that men and women should be paid equally for work of equal value - provides the most telling example. Bill C-10 would end the right of federal civil servants to take pay equity complaints to the federal human rights commission. Instead, such issues would have to be dealt with as part of the normal bargaining process between union and management.

And in determining whether wage rates for men and women were fair, any arbitrator would have to take "market forces" into account.

The problem with this is twofold. First, as a federal task force wrote five years ago, collective bargaining involves tradeoffs. But a woman's constitutionally protected right to be paid fairly is hardly something that should be traded away for an extra coffee break.

Equally important is the reference to market forces. Toronto lawyer Mary Cornish points out that pay equity was designed specifically to rectify a failure in the market that permitted systemic wage discrimination against women. To turn around and subordinate equity to this same market is to negate the entire exercise.

She notes that when former Ontario premier Mike Harris made a similar attack on provincial pay equity, the courts slapped him down.

Women aren't the only target of the Liberal-Conservative budget bill. Federal government workers of both sexes face measures that would cap wage increases for the next two years at 1.5 per cent annually. That in itself may mean little. In hard times, it's hard for any union to negotiate big pay raises.

But to add injury to insult, the caps are retroactive to 2006. According to the Public Service Alliance of Canada, that means some workers face wage rollbacks. Jail guards are already threatening a court challenge.

Harper is also using Bill C-10 to quietly legislate other measures on his agenda that have little or nothing to do with the economic crisis, such as:

Raising the threshold for government review of foreign takeovers from $295 million to $1 billion. The bill would also give the government new powers to refuse any foreign takeover on the grounds of "national security" (a measure prompted by recent Chinese attempts to buy Canadian resource firms).

Raising the ceiling on foreign ownership of domestic airlines such as Air Canada from 25 to 49 per cent. The Liberals used to decry this as selling out the national interest. However, in their latter years in government, and under pressure from Air Canada, they suggested something similar.

Amending the Navigable Waters Protection Act to let the cabinet exempt certain kinds of rivers and lakes from regulations that limit damming or dumping. Quebec New Democrat MP Thomas Mulcair, that party's deputy leader, argues that this is a part of a broader plan to weaken environmental rules. And it's true that, as the Star reported last month, Transport Minister John Baird has publicly mused about cutting back the scope of environmental assessment laws, saying they create too much red tape.

All told, it's a modestly ideological agenda for a government that's supposed to have been forced into centre ground. But it seems that Stephen Harper is still Stephen Harper. And, thanks largely to the helpful support of Ignatieff's Liberals, he can get away with it.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.
© 2009 Torstar Corporation