Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak at report stage of Bill C-12 concerning unemployment insurance, or, if you prefer, to use the government's misleading terminology, the bill concerning employment insurance.
At this stage, I would like to remind you of the Bloc's position concerning unemployment insurance reform and its transformation, as if by magic, into an employment insurance program. Like the majority of Quebecers, like the majority of Canadians who have already demonstrated their dissatisfaction with the planned reform throughout the country, like the witnesses who appeared before the human resources development committee, 75 per cent of the witnesses, 75 per cent of the briefs submitted to the committee, we are strongly opposed to Bill C-12.
We are asking, and we will continue to ask until the last possible minute, because that is what Quebecers and Canadians want, that this bill be withdrawn, scrapped, and that there be a real unemployment insurance program, a real program concerning the job market, a real comprehensive policy combining the income security needed by men and women who may find themselves unemployed, which can happen anytime to anyone, with job training and active employment measures.
In other words, it is important to come up with a real unemployment insurance reform corresponding to the present job market, and to ensure that people who find themselves in this unfortunate situation are able in the short or medium term to re-enter the job market with lasting results.
What the reform presents us with is not really that. We are faced with an unfair bill. A regressive bill. An anti-employment bill. We are faced with a bill with the potential to create more poverty than it alleviates.
Changing a bill's name from unemployment insurance to employment insurance is easily done, but the reality is that employment has never been a concern of this government. The precarious job situation has never been the focus in any way of this government's concerns, nor has the unemployment situation been the object of any really serious efforts by this government.
How can this government have any real credibility, when even the Prime Minister stated some months ago to a select audience in Toronto that he considered Canada's unemployed to be lazy beer-drinkers?
How can we think that this government can focus in any way whatsoever on the situation of the least advantaged in society, when only a few weeks ago the Minister of Human Resources Development told us that those demonstrating their displeasure with the government were extremists, separatists? I would remind you that such displeasure was being shown even in his own riding, that there were demonstrations in his riding, unless of course his constituents include sovereignists and separatists, or were supported by them.
But for him it boiled down to that: people were extremists because they would not stand still to have their legs chopped off, as Bill C-12 proposes, or separatists, or what the Prime Minister called lazy people who ought to be out working instead of demonstrating. So that is the vision of this government as far as the most disadvantaged members of society are concerned.
This bill which, among other things, raises the number of hours worked required in order to collect UI, while decreasing the amount of benefits considerably, ought to simply be withdrawn. The government must admit that it has made a mistake with this. It needs to get back to the drawing board, to rework a real employment insurance plan, one which suits the work force's needs.
The other day, I was listening to the Minister of Economic Development for PEI, Robert Morrissey. He said that for Prince Edward Island alone, the loss of revenue for the 1996-97 fiscal year would be $15 million. This is a disaster for such a small province.
I was discussing this issue with my colleague from Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup and, according to him, the Lower St. Lawrence area, where under-employment is most serious, will lose $20 million this year if the minister's bill is implemented.
I remind the House that last year this government had already deprived Quebecers and Canadians of about $2,4 billion by shamefully slashing UI funds, benefits paid to the most needy in our society.
Bill C-17 we considered last year was less harmful than the reform proposed today, so you can imagine the results if it is implemented. I remind members that, in Quebec alone, some 46,000 people were totally excluded from the labour market last year because of the policy of restraint already announced in the finance minister's budget.
I find unacceptable that a government which ran on the promise of job creation and supposedly on the basis of a social vision for the most disadvantaged, could take 46,000 people out of the labour
force with the stroke of a pen, by adopting brutal measures that did not meet the needs of the most needy of our society.
Meanwhile, this government prides itself on having built up surpluses in the UI fund. It boasts about accumulating a minimum of $5 billion annually from employers' and employees' contributions. What is this government doing with this $5 billion, when it has dipped into Canadians' and Quebecers' pockets, literally robbed them of more than $2 billion since last year along with another several hundred million dollars this year with new measures? During this time, it takes an accumulated surplus of $5 billion annually to reduce its deficit so that the Minister of Finance appears to be a good manager by controlling the course of the deficit. This way of operating is unacceptable.
And when things start to heat up, and the lid on the pot is lifting, the government has three courses of action. It tries to buy people, just as the Minister of Finance did recently with the three maritime provinces when he offered $961 million for a pseudo reform of the GST, which has really left his government squirming of late.
When buying people does not work-I hope the people of the maritimes will not be foolish enough to swallow the GST reform, take $961 million in compensation and permit a reform that will spell catastrophe for their community in the coming years-this government becomes cynical, gets carried away and tries to trick people as to its intentions or its actions.
We heard all that was said by the Minister of National Defence in response to questioning on the many scandals in his department and by the Prime Minister in an attempt to convince us, Quebecers and Canadians, that he had resolved the problem of the GST, when the problem remains intact, even with the resignation of the Deputy Prime Minister. And when that does not work either, the government has a third approach to getting or trying to get people to swallow what it is pushing and that is by gagging the opposition and this Parliament.
Since last week, we have been gagged three times and thus prevented from debating, until basic issues like Bill C-12 die.
The first gag was applied to this bill, and the time for members' debate in the House of Commons was limited. This time serves to help Quebecers and Canadians, who are being had by this government, understand that it says one thing and does another. The second was applied to Bill C-31, which included a section on the scandalous agreement between the federal government and the three maritime provinces on the GST. The third was applied to human rights, and a gag was also imposed on that debate yesterday.
This way of operating is unacceptable and we are voicing, through this analysis at report stage of Bill C-12, our dissatisfaction with the intentions of the government in its shameful reform of the unemployment insurance system.