Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and speak to the motion presented by the member for Bas-Richelieu—Nicolet—Bécancour. In the motion the member put forward the notion that the government should, as quickly as possible, implement a genuine income support program for older workers who lost their jobs in order to ease their transition from active employment to pension benefits. Of course, nowhere in that motion does the member indicate that there should not be other measures as well as income support to bridge people into pensions when they involuntarily lose their employment.
The New Democrats will be supporting this motion. We recognize that older workers in our communities from coast to coast to coast are suffering in the current economic downturn.
Sadly, this is not new information. I want to refer to an article from 1995. This article is called “Older Workers in Transition”. I think the words in this article capture exactly what older workers are facing right now in our communities. It said:
Many older workers today are perplexed and dismayed by the swift and dramatic changes occurring in the work place. For most of their adult lives, they have functioned successfully in stable work environments where they anticipated holding their jobs until retirement. These older workers are discovering that they may not achieve their dreams of spending the last years of their work lives productively and they may not achieve financially independent retirement.
It went on to talk about 15 years prior to 1995:
However, in the last 15 years, they have often found themselves outside of the plant gates wondering what happened, or still inside, but anticipating dramatic workplace changes that threaten their job security. Plant closures, downsizings, restructuring, new technologies, international trade agreements, ecological concerns, changing demographics, have affected the Canadian workforce.
That could have been written in this day and age because the older workers in our communities are facing exactly the same kinds of circumstances.
As other members have rightly pointed out, older workers have many skills. They have much work experience to bring to a new work opportunity. However, what we have to acknowledge is that older workers also come from a range of skill sets, a range of work experiences, a range of socio-economic backgrounds, and a range of communities. We need to have programs that are broad in spectrum in order to address this very diverse group of workers.
We know, of course, that in many of our communities, and some of the more rural communities, or some of the communities outside of large urban centres, that older workers simply do not have access to other kinds of employment once the single industry in their town has shut down. In this day and age I cannot understand why we would be saying to older workers that they have to disrupt their entire family. If they are 64 or 59, close to retirement, we are going to ask them to move away from their children and grandchildren, and their family connections. Instead, a much more humane approach, exactly as the Bloc has proposed, would be this bridging program that allows people to move and bridge from their work career into retirement.
For workers who choose this option there absolutely needs to be retraining programs, mobility assistance programs, counselling programs, and all of those other things for workers who are able and want to stay within the workforce. We absolutely need to support those workers, but we also need to recognize that for some workers this is just not an option.
I want to speak specifically for one moment about the forestry sector in my own riding of Nanaimo—Cowichan, and this is throughout B.C. This is from an article from February 2009, but, again, we know that the forestry sector has not significantly turned around. This is from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, CCPA. It said:
B.C. has lost 65 sawmills, four pulp mills and about 20,000 jobs in the forest industry. With a spin off effect of about 1 to 3, this means a loss of about 60,000 jobs. And let's not forget about the tens of millions of dollars of revenue that is no longer being sent to government coffers to help pay for health care and education.
Out of those 20,000 workers, we know that there is an aging workforce in the forestry sector. We know that many of these workers have spent their entire lives in forestry, some of them in logging, sawmills, and some in the value-added. Literally, we are talking about workers who have often spent 35 or 40 years in the forestry sector, and some of them are living in the more rural and remote communities.
Now we are going to say, “I'm sorry, forestry worker, despite all of the years that you've put into your company, your community, we're not going to recognize those years and we're not going to provide you with that bridging so that you can have a dignified retirement. Instead, we are going to force you to move out of province,” in my case, off Vancouver Island, “to somewhere else, and we're going to ask you to disrupt your family in the years where you should actually be looking at enjoying some of your retirement or looking forward to your retirement”.
Many times, of course, what is happening with these workers is that, as they leave our communities, they are forced into other seasonal, part-time, contract work, which still does not provide them with any income security.
In terms of the forestry sector, we know that we recently had the black liquor subsidy where there was some money provided to try to offset the impact in the forestry sector, but we are now looking at further threats from the U.S. around an additional kind of subsidy that is going to continue to harm our forestry sector from coast to coast to coast. I would argue that these workers simply do not deserve to be treated in this fashion.
We do have a program right now that is a targeted initiative for older workers. It provides some support for workers who do wish to continue with employment. However, when we look at it, it talks about employment assistance activities, such as assessment counselling, resumé writing, interview techniques, job-finding clubs and so on. But nowhere in that targeted initiative for older workers is there mention of any kind of income support or pension bridging.
We know that there was formerly a program for older workers that was in effect until sometime in the 1990s. We also know that program was cancelled in all the program cuts that were happening in the 1990s and those workers were hung out to dry, essentially, by previous governments.
What we also understand is that the program, this income support, this pension bridging for older workers, needs to be only one aspect of a program for workers. New Democrats have put forward some suggestions around what needs to happen with pensions. We have seen the Nortel demonstration that happened last week on Parliament Hill, where Nortel workers were raising issues around the fact that because of the insolvency of Nortel many of these workers were looking at the fact that they were going to have their pension income substantially reduced.
What we know, as well, is that many Canadians are simply relying on CPP, Canada pension or old age security, OAS, for their retirement income because they simply have not been in the kinds of employment that provided them with the opportunity to have a company pension plan. Many low wage seasonal workers and many women have never had the wherewithal to save for retirement.
We know that as the baby boomers are moving toward retirement, this country is going to face significant challenges with pension retirement income. We know that in the past, women were adversely affected. There were some efforts made about 20 years ago to reverse the situation for women because women are often in seasonal, contract, low-wage jobs. That is not always the case, but a significant number of women are in that kind of employment. We know that as the baby boomers retire, we are going to see more women falling deeper into poverty.
New Democrats have put together a proposal for some of the things that we think need to be included in pension reform. These include: an increasingly guaranteed income supplement to end seniors' poverty; strengthening the Canada pension plan and Quebec pension plan, in consultation with the provinces, with the goal of doubling benefits; developing a national pension insurance scheme funded by employer pension plans; and creating a national facility to adopt workplace pension plans of companies in bankruptcy.
New Democrats will be supporting this motion, but we are also urging the government to take very seriously the looming crisis in pension income that is facing this country.