Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government narrowly passed legislation Dec. 12 that forces all labour organizations to hand over detailed information on their finances, spending and activities for posting on a public website.
C-377, the private member’s bill introduced by Conservative MP Russ Hiebert, will require all labour organizations, whether unions or not, to provide the Canada Revenue Agency with extensive details about their expenditures.
“No other organizations in Canada are required to provide such detailed reports,” said James Turk, executive director of CAUT. “The objective of the legislation is not transparency, but imposing burdens on labour groups to make it harder to represent their members effectively.”
He asserts that if transparency had been the goal, the Tories would not have opposed the amendment to have the same requirements apply to employer groups.
Many voices have spoken out against the legislation.
Just before the vote on the bill, Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair said, “It will be thrown out by the courts; I have no doubt about that. This is an attempt by the Conservatives to break down the system of representation and protection of workers’ rights in Canada.”
The bill is just “red meat” for the Conservatives’ right-wing base, he added.
Valerie Lawson, a spokesperson for Canada’s privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, said there remain “privacy concerns” with C-377.
Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti estimated the cost of setting up an oversight regime to ensure compliance could range from $32 million to $45 million a year.
There are between 25,000 and 30,000 labour organizations that will have to file 26 pages of reports to the federal government. Georgetti noted that’s close to the number of union groups in the United States that send far less comprehensive financial reports to the American government, which spends $40 million a year to handle them.
Members of the opposition see the new law as part of a North American campaign, financed by business interests to weaken unions and other employee groups to the benefit of non-unionized employers in construction and other industries.
“Bill C-377 would give confidential information to businesses and government, which would give them unfair competitive and political advantages over the labour movement,” said NDP MP Wayne Marston.
Five Conservative MPs voted against the bill including Alberta MP Brent Rathgeber who questioned the disparity in the bill only applying to labour organizations.
“As a legislator, I’m just having a difficult time determining exactly what the public interest is in this type of legislation,” he said.
Rathgeber said unions are essentially private clubs like law societies or industry associations that benefit from tax deductions.
“So I just cannot accept the premise that tax-deducted union dues are somehow akin to public dollars and therefore creating a public interest,” he said.
The bill now goes to the senate where it will be debated sometime in the new year. Should it pass the senate, the Canada Revenue Agency has said it would require substantial time — probably until 2014 — to set up the systems required under the bill.
CAUT has been working with the CLC and other organizations to lobby against the bill. “In consultation with others, we are exploring legal options as well,” said Turk.