Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to represent the NDP during the second reading debate on Bill C-278. I want to recognize and pay tribute to my colleague from Trois-Rivières for bringing the issue of employment insurance to the House of Commons where we can debate it. I would also like to recognize and acknowledge the contribution that my NDP colleague from Acadie—Bathurst has made in his tireless advocacy on behalf of an employment insurance system that works instead of an employment insurance system that clearly is broken, dysfunctional and fails to provide its core function, which is income maintenance on behalf of unemployed workers.
I am here to tell everybody here that the current employment insurance system does not work any more. It is not an insurance system at all. It is another tax on workers because they have to pay into the program but it is almost impossible to collect any benefits should they become unemployed.
The current employment insurance system is a cash cow for the Liberal government. It was designed that way and, believe it or not, and it is almost unbelievable to me the more I research it, it was yielding $750 million a month more into the coffers of the Liberal government than in benefits being paid out. The Liberals could have fixed that but they chose not to because they were harvesting the money. They were reaping the money out of the employment insurance system and on the backs of unemployed people.
I want to point out that just in my own riding of Winnipeg Centre the cutbacks to eligibility caused $20.8 million less per year in benefits going to people in my riding; $20.8 million a year sucked right out of the heart of my riding. It has pushed more low income people into actual poverty because they have gone from unemployed wage earners to being cut off the insurance program that they paid into in good faith.
To deduct something from a worker's paycheque for a specific purpose, income maintenance if one is unemployed, and then to use it for something completely different, such as tax cuts for the wealthy, is, at the very best case scenario, a breach of trust and, in the worst case scenario, out and out fraud. That is what we have been faced with for the past decade of the current employment insurance program.
When the member for Trois-Rivières tries to bring some integrity into the employment insurance system, I am here to thank her, applaud her and celebrate that action.
I cannot believe the comments from the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell when he tries to sell this as an improved employment insurance program. Nobody qualifies any more. They take and take off people's paycheques but if people are unfortunate enough to become unemployed they will not be eligible for any benefits. What kind of an insurance scheme is that?
What would we think of a house insurance scheme that makes it mandatory to pay premiums but if our house burns down we would have less than a 40% chance of collecting any benefits? We would not call that an insurance program. We would call that a rip-off, a fraud and a lie.
The government has been harvesting money out of the employment insurance system for a decade and incrementally rationing little improvements back up to where it once was. It was once operating as an employment insurance system.
I am a carpenter by trade. I have been on EI probably 10 times because it was designed to help people who, because of the nature of their work or other reasons, were simply unlucky to find themselves unemployed. That is what it was for. Well, I wish everyone good luck in qualifying now. I will not even have time to go into the gender bias. It is completely unfair to women in that women are more likely to be in part time employment situations and the least likely to qualify. Does anyone know what the percentage is of women in part time jobs who are eligible for EI? It is 25%. If we factor in Canadian youth who are unemployed, it is 15%.
Who would design such a program? It is clearly not designed to provide income maintenance to unemployed people. It is designed to be a cash cow for the Liberal government so it can use it for its priorities, one of which has been tax cuts for the wealthy. Talk about a perverse form of Robin Hood; rob the poor to give tax cuts for the rich.
As members can tell, this program has infuriated me ever since 1996 when the government implemented these changes and gutted the UI system.
The member for Glengarry--Prescott--Russell pointed out that the government has to assume the responsibility if the fund goes into arrears and therefore it is justified to go into surplus. If we add up the total accumulated deficit ever since the program was implemented in 1948, it has been $11 billion. It has fallen into arrears by $1 billion, $2 billion, $5 billion now and then in times of high unemployment, for a total of $11 billion to $13 billion, depending on how we add it up, but the current surplus in the fund is $50 billion. It is almost five times higher than it needs to be, which is what the Auditor General keeps pointing out. The government is stockpiling money like crazy, except it is not stockpiling it. It is spending it.
As the Prime Minister has pointed out when questioned on this, there is no EI fund, there is no pile of $50 billion of our money waiting there. The government spent it. It was taken off our paycheques. The unemployed were promised income maintenance and then the government spent the money on something completely different. That is not fair to Canadians.
Let us point out again that this is not the government's money. In the 1980s the federal government stopped contributing to the EI fund. It used to be a tripartite venture: employer, employee and the government paying into it. It ceased to be that. Now it is just employee and employer. The government does not pay a penny into the EI fund other than to administer it. Therefore it is not even the government's money. It has no right to the money, except that it passed the prerequisite enabling legislation where it says that it has the right to deduct that money off our cheques and use it for whatever it sees fit.
I have to mention one of the most galling changes the government made. As a carpenter I deal with carpenter apprentices in trade school. The government began assigning a waiting period for apprentices when they leave the job to go to trade school. They are not unemployed and they never had that problem before. Income maintenance for apprentices in trade school was one of the designated uses allowed under the old Unemployment Insurance Act but the government started applying a waiting period, so for the first two weeks of their trade school they do not get any benefit at all.
It is a lousy $80 million a year savings when the government chose to do this but the calculated effect that it has had is that 11,000 apprentices have dropped out of trade school because they could not afford to be without income for that period of time.
The government is showing a surplus of $750 a month by gutting the income maintenance for apprentices at trade school. It is saving $80 million but 11,000 tradesmen are leaving the trade because of this incredibly flawed policy in dealing with employment insurance.
I am looking at Bill C-278 as an opportunity to restore some fairness back into the employment insurance system and get the qualifying period down to where people will actually be eligible and qualify for benefits, and to increase the benefits, not wildly but back to where they were which was at 60% of our income, which is what my hon. colleague from Trois-Rivières is proposing.
She is not proposing a grossly luxurious plan. She is proposing that the EI program be put back to where it was before the Liberals cut it back to 55%, to do away with the waiting period for apprentices when they are in trade school, and to deal with the incredible gender inequities and imbalance. If the government is supposed to have a gender screen or gender analysis to any legislation it puts forward, somehow this missed the analysis and the screen all together.
I will be voting in favour of Bill C-278 in the interest of fairness, in the interest of giving people what they paid for and in the interest of ending this travesty that the government calls the employment insurance system, but which has really been the biggest rip-off in recent Canadian history.