Malcolm Allen

[Fairness for the Self-Employed Act, November 5th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right. We have a gaping hole in the system. We can point fingers at folks and say that they created this hole and we have to fix it, but I will not comment on that now. However, the hole is there, and we recognize it. Congratulations to all who have recognized that. Now, let us stop trying to paper it over. Let us stop taking those little sticky notes one by one and slapping them up against that hole. Let us fix the hole.

We all understand there is a hole in the system, so let us come together, as a minority Parliament, and lets fix it. That is what it is about, working together in unison, understanding what is wrong with the system, understanding the hardship that Canadians are facing when they are unemployed and when they are sick. We know what it will take to fix it, so let us do that in the spirit of co-operation. Let us stand shoulder to shoulder and tell them that we understand their hardship, that we understand what we need to do, and let us simply do it.

A comprehensive review would fix the hole. Papering it over will only mean the hole will come back because each bit of paper will finally fall off that hole.

[Fairness for the Self-Employed Act, November 5th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Nanaimo—Cowichan for splitting her time, and thank all of my colleagues in the New Democratic Party for the work they have done over a great many years on this file regarding unemployment insurance.

I prefer to call it unemployment insurance rather than using the term for the premium collections of the employment insurance system, which finds itself in a dark hole under the current government as it was under the previous one which let $57 billion slip through its fingers. If a business lost $57 billion, it would be bankrupt, but it seems that we can spend it in other places and forget about it.

I would also like to be on the record as congratulating my good friend and colleague from Acadie—Bathurst. As my colleague from Nanaimo—Cowichan said, he has really led the charge in the House to try to make sure that we look at this whole system in its totality. Over the last number of sessions, we have been nibbling away at the edges of the unemployment system.

Basically, we are making this little change and that little change, not that this is a small change for those self-employed workers out there who are looking for compassionate care and maternity, parental and sick benefits. These are important things for those workers out there now, who at one time more than likely had that protection.

As my colleague said, all too many of them, in my riding as well, who once had well-paid manufacturing jobs are now forced into being entrepreneurs. I know that the pulp and paper makers in Newfoundland are faced with the same thing today. It is not because they necessarily want to be entrepreneurs. Eventually, what they have found is that there are no longer employers there to actually employ them, so they find themselves having to go out there.

What happens to them? The government's own document says that over 75% of the self-employed earned less than the maximum insurable earnings. Yet, if we were to look at those honourable workers in the pulp and paper industry up in the north of Newfoundland, the auto workers in southern Ontario and workers across this country, we would find that the bulk of those workers in the manufacturing sector made more than the maximum insurable earnings. They have now been forced into this so-called self-employment scheme. It seems to me it was driven at them when they least expected it and did not want it.

Here we have workers who indeed would have paid into the system for a long period of time, perhaps 20 or 25 years in some cases. We are seeing that type of worker who has worked that length of time forced out of work and forced into self-employment. One of the major training programs through the EI fund used to get a person to open up their own business. One of the major pushes seen inside of it is to go and do that.

For those who truly want to do that, it is a good thing. However, for those who feel forced and compelled to do it because they have no other options, that is a sad thing. It is a sad day in the sense that the government did not bring forward regular benefits for the self-employed, period, including all of these special benefits, as the EI system calls them, and put them together as a whole and made those workers whole like any other workers.

At the end of the day, they are workers. They work at home for the most part, but they are workers. People say that they own their own businesses, set their own standards and set their own times. Perhaps they do, but nonetheless, they work for a living. That is exactly what they do. Ultimately, we should have looked at that in its totality and protected it.

If we are going to review the system, let us review it in its totality and let us make it work as it once did. We have seen that it has been eroded. Unfortunately, it was beginning to be eroded under the Liberal government. I know that my colleagues down there will say, “Not I, not I. I was not here at the time”, but certainly, the Liberal Party eroded the system when it was in government. There was a $57 billion surplus. They could have covered every self-employed worker in this country for regular benefits and special benefits and it would not have made a dent in the $57 billion surplus. They chose not to.

Now, here we are at a moment in our history where the economy is in desperate straits and workers find themselves on the streets. Self-employed workers who thought that they were going to be able to build a business find themselves unemployed because their businesses have basically failed. We are now saying that maybe we need to build the model now.

I suppose some would say better late than never. The unfortunate part is all those souls who were lost between the time when we could have done it and had the money to do it and today when we are now thinking about doing it for special benefits.

How do we look at all those folks and say to them, “Sorry, we did not do it”?

I think that is a question all of us should ask ourselves. Truly we owed that debt to them and we should have paid it.

Now we need to get on with the work of making this happen. Yes, there are some flaws in the system when it comes to special benefits, and it happens in the regular scheme as well for those we call “employed persons” who work for an employer and have their deductions made at the moment. If they happen to be in an adoption situation they do not get the same time a natural birth mother gets. We do not have that at the moment. They get parental benefits but they do not get the additional 15 weeks.

The government should have included that. It could have used it as the springboard to actually give back to the other workers who worked through the regular employment system and paid regular employment insurance, to make sure that adoptive parents got the whole year off and collected unemployment insurance.

The government should have waived the two weeks. If one is sick, the two-week waiting period should be waived. The person is sick, for heaven's sake.

I can just imagine folks who contract H1N1 and have to be off work because the employer tells them to stay away. They will not get paid for two weeks. They are going to have to wait for those two weeks and they will get nothing for those two weeks.

It is all well and good to say one will get 15 weeks' sick time but the reality is they are going to lose the first two. If they are better, they will come back to work. So they are out the two weeks' pay.

I think we should have looked at that as being an opportunity if the government wished to do that. Hopefully we can look at that at committee, because, as some of my colleagues said earlier today, there are some things they would like to see done and some things they would like to see worked on.

When we look at the package, it is incomplete. It is a good first start. As others have said in the House, the government at least brought something forward. The Conservatives said that they promised it in the throne speech and they will take credit for it.

I am glad they heard the member for Acadie—Bathurst and perhaps they read his report before the throne speech and made sure they added it in.

In 1999 when the member did this report we made a pledge to workers to fix the system.

I worked in that system for a long time as an advocate for the unemployed, going back to 1990. I know the type of system that has been developed over the years and the hardships that they face trying to work through the system as it has changed over the years with the amendments to it, through the computerization of it and all of the other intricacies that we have seen over time. It did not work for workers and it should work for workers.

We need to get our heads around the fact that it is the unemployed that we are supposed to be protecting, not the system, not the collection of the money. Those are important to make it self-financing. However, it is about the system of protecting those who work and who, for whatever reasons, find themselves out of work whether because of sickness or because they are at that joyous moment in their life when have decided to have children and indeed they have them, and they want to be with their youngster, as someone said earlier, to hear the first voice, to hear that first word, to see that first step. All of us who have had the great joy of having children know what great occasions those are.

I appreciate the fact that we have changed the system from the days when my wife and I were graced with twins 27 years ago and she got only 15 weeks of maternity benefits. There were no parental benefits in those days. We have moved forward. That is a good thing.

However we have far to go. We could be doing it now. That is the sadness I see here today. Yes, there is a good piece here to work with, but the sadness is how much further we have to go. The fact is the alarm bell was rung 10 years ago by New Democrats when that report was written by the member for Acadie—Bathurst, and we needed to do it then.

Here we are 10 years later and we are still moving along ever so slowly. That is the great sadness I find with the changes in the bill.

I hope my colleagues are absolutely sincere and genuine in what I am hearing them say today, which is that they believe the system needs to be changed in a comprehensive way. I believe that is ultimately what they said.

If they did say that, I hope we will all be working in unison so eventually we will be making a system that truly works for the unemployed, because it is theirs. It belongs to them. They paid for it. It does not belong to the House. It belongs to the workers of this country and they ought to have what they have demanded of us which is a system that works for all of them under which they are all treated equally.

[Excise Tax Act, November 5th, 2009]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-480, An Act to amend the Excise Tax Act (no GST on poppies or poppy wreathes).

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Hamilton Mountain for seconding this bill.

As we are aware as we head to Remembrance Day, the selling of poppies, which all of us in this House are wearing and will be wearing up until that day, is the major fundraiser for the veterans and for the legion branches that use that money to help those veterans who are in need.

What we have found is that when the Dominion Command has to go and purchase those poppies, it pays the GST. We need every penny to go to veterans. One way to make sure every penny goes to veterans is to give back that GST to those veterans. That is what the legion branches do: give every penny to veterans.

The veterans deserve that, and we have a right to give it back to them. We should do that.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[MADE IN CANADA ACT, November 3rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I have listened with great interest to my colleagues from both the Liberals and the Conservatives talk about this in a protectionist sense. They ought to open up their eyes because the world has been doing it for years and continues to do it.

The most recent piece about the buy America act simply highlighted what has been going on for the past 55 years. In fact, it is slightly more than that. The buy America act was enacted some 50-odd years ago. It is not new. It is not an Obama situation.

The reason that folks finally paid attention is because of the economic downturn and the huge number of dollars that the federal government in the U.S. pushed into its system and said to give it to state and local governments to decide what to do. The 50 U.S. states have a buy America act. Their local governments buy local.

The reason Bombardier has a plant in Plattsburgh instead of the Americans importing from Thunder Bay is because New York State has a buy New York State policy when it comes to buses. That is why the Plattsburgh plant and the supplier park that surrounds it has thousands of jobs that should be in Canada where Bombardier is the home company.

However, because of the decision it made a long time ago, that is exactly where the plant relocated and it is not alone. The European consortium that builds buses also happens to be in Plattsburgh, just down the road from the Bombardier plant.

With regard to how much of the economy we are talking about, my friends on the other side of the aisle and down the way think that the whole economy is about to be protected. We are talking about 23% of the total economy. Those are the latest numbers for what local, provincial and territorial governments would buy via their procurement policies, which leaves 77% of the economy open to be governed by international trade deals.

It is really transparent, it seems to me, in the NAFTA accord where chapter 10 talks about there not being any provisions to stop local governments from having local procurement. They can make the decisions.

In the province of Ontario local government is mandated by the provincial government, having been a member of municipal government previously, to develop its own procurement policies and the policies are entirely written up by the local government.

I had the great pleasure, starting about two years ago, of travelling to meet with nearly all of the municipal governments in the Niagara region and asking them to consider procurement policies that looked at buying Canadian. Basically, all of them agreed because it really boils down to one common element.

When it comes to government, it collects money. It does not sell things to people. It does not make things for sale. It taxes people and collects their money. People entrust it to government and then they want it to appropriate that money and spend it wisely.

One of the questions I put to mayors in my region was this. If they are collecting money from their neighbours, why would they not spend it on them? It is their money, after all. Why would they give it to some foreign national? Why would they send it across the way? Of course, most say they get a better price there, it is more competitive, and that is how they drive the competitiveness. My reply to that is, how much was saved? Usually it is pennies. If they are lucky, it is a penny on the dollar.

If people are laid off because we decided to buy what they make somewhere else, what is the cost to the municipality? Initially, it is EI, so it is a cost to the federal government, which really is all of us in this country. At some point in time, if that person does not get a job, people go on social assistance, which in Ontario is borne by the municipality.

If we look at the true cost of what these things really do and factor that into the whole equation, we will find that buying local is not only smart but it builds community. It does not put us at a disadvantage. It does not hamper us from getting good quality materials. It does not hamper our competitiveness. When it comes to large purchases involving hundreds of millions of dollars, when it comes to infrastructure for buses and rail cars, if we decide to buy somewhere else, Europe for instance, it is our workers who are laid off.

As we have seen in this country, 400,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared. None of them have been replaced. It was not about a sense of being competitive and replacing those jobs with something else. They are gone.

We, in this House, are all too well aware of what has happened to the economy of this country. If we do not decide to invest in our own, who will? Who will if not us? We speak for all Canadians. We speak for all of those who have come here and if we are not going to speak for them, it is hard for me to imagine that Nokia is going to speak for them in Finland, or that some plant and some manufacturer in Stuttgart is going to speak for Canadians from there. Canadians are looking to us to speak for them and we should. That is our job. That is the role we play.

We are not looking at closing, putting up walls and closing doors, and saying we do not wish to trade with the rest of the world. We understand we are a trading nation. The world understands we are a trading nation. In fact, the world looks at us and says the Canadians really do not get it, so let us sell our stuff to them because they do not have procurement policies.

Every major manufacturing country in this world has a procurement policy, whether it is Mexico, Japan, Germany, U.K., or whether it is the Americans who we trade nearly 80% of our products with. All have inside their walls, inside their country, local procurement policies. Yet, we refuse in this country, at least at the federal level to this point in time, to acknowledge that. At the local level across this country there are quite a few municipalities which are saying they are going to take the initiative because one of the fallacies about the NAFTA was that somehow provinces and municipalities could not enact buy Canadian. How wrong they were. Of course, they got that advice from the federal cousins. Their federal counterparts said they cannot do that, NAFTA says no.

Of course, when the buy American act raised its head and all that money poured in, all of a sudden it became oops, now we need to change it. Now we see the Minister of International Trade down in the U.S. cap in hand, trying to say, “Let us do something about the buy American act”. We are trying to negotiate a deal with nothing in our hand. We have an empty cap, hoping for coppers to be placed in that cap. That is not what we ought to be doing. We should be fighting for Canadian jobs because it really is about making sure they are protected.

What do municipalities buy? In my riding a town called Thorold enacted a buy Canadian policy. In fact, when officials go to the local hardware store just to buy a shovel, they make sure it is a Canadian shovel. Their lapel pins have “Made in Canada”, contrary to what we have received as part of our allotment of Canadian pins made in China. There is a community that understands about standing up for its citizens, its workers. What do their citizens say about that resolution? They are in full support.

One survey asked about municipal transit buying buses. Specifically, 9 out of 10 Canadians surveyed said we should buy Canadian buses if they are made here. Just so everyone knows, we make buses in this country. We make very good buses in this country. But I guess the Minister of National Defence did not think we made good enough buses to give to the defence department, to give to our brave soldiers overseas and our soldiers who are here in this country. He decided to buy them from Germany. We could have made them in Chatham, no more than five or six hours drive from here. We could have made those buses, but instead we shipped them over and allowed the Germans to make those buses.

If we had said we will like to build buses for the German army, imagine the response of the chancellor of Germany. I am sure she would have said, “Not on, we will make our own buses, thank you very kindly, for our troops” and that is exactly what we should have done. The difference in what it cost for those buses in Germany versus here was infinitesimal. Add in the cost of what happened to the workers in that plant in Chatham who are now laid off and the cost now is disproportionate because it would have been cheaper to make them in Chatham than have them shipped from Germany. The same quality buses, the same type of things that we were looking at, and that situation can be extrapolated across this country into municipalities, into the provinces, so that we will put our workers back to work.

We are going to collect their money as I said earlier and it is their money. If we are going to make an investment in anyone, it ought to be them because it is their money after all. They would be grateful for the fact that we thought it was important to invest in them and not send it overseas.

[Employment Insurance Act, November 3rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her passionate advocacy on behalf of those who are unfortunate to be laid off.

During her speech she made an interesting comment about how she saw folks change in the transition from this side of the House to the government benches. I would like her to comment further on that.

When the Conservatives were on this side of the House, they said one thing about employment insurance and the Liberals were on the other side doing something altogether different. Now the Liberals have come to this side of the House, having been replaced by the Conservatives on the government benches, and now we hear the Liberals saying something altogether different.

It seems that there are only two parties in this House that actually speak for the unemployed on a consistent basis. I would commend my colleague and her colleagues in that party, as well as my own party for standing up for workers.

Would she not agree with us that what really is needed is a comprehensive review of the EI system? We need to undo what the Liberals did during the 1990s to ensure that the unemployed are protected across this country from coast to coast to coast.

[Employment Insurance Act, November 3rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his intervention and speech. I will call him brother because we both come from labour movements. There is no question we represent them ably and there is no question that we stand for them. Both he and I would probably agree that when we end up going to the bargaining table, we do not get everything we want. It would be nice if we could, but there is no question about that.

To my other colleague who said that this was perhaps peanuts, I would invite him to come to Welland and talk to John Deere workers who are facing foreclosures on their mortgages because their employment insurance is about to run out, and tell them it is peanuts as they lose their home and perhaps their family breaks up. If that is peanuts, I will vote for the peanuts to ensure that families stay in their houses and that families stay together.

There is no question this does not cover all workers, and we would love it to cover all workers. I think we are in agreement with the Bloc on that fact. That is what we ultimately want to do, but those of us who come from a labour world understand that when we have demands on the table, we just do not get them all. It would be nice if we did.

The one thing about living a long time is life experience teaches us that we do not get all things when we want them. Sometimes we have to accept the fact that we only get some of the things we would like. In this particular case, only some of the folks will be covered; others will not.

To my colleague from the Bloc I say that there are probably members in a labour union in some places in Quebec who will get some, and there are those who will be left out, just like in my province of Ontario. Clearly, Canadians will be winners when it comes to this, in the sense that they will get coverage that they otherwise would not have. Voting it down will give them nothing.

[Employment Insurance Act, November 3rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right. When it comes to industrial policy in the country, we saw a manufacturer that was making money and a union that bargained a collective agreement that took into consideration where the dollar was heading, which was an upward spiral at the time, to ensure the company would remain profitable.

The workers, by the company's own admission, were the best in North America. That is what the CEO told me. Yet at the first opportunity, the plant was moved, lock, stock and barrel, to Mexico, minus the hoops of one barrel on its way past Wisconsin. It simply dropped off there. It laid off 800 workers in Welland from a place that had been there for almost 100 years. It was nearing its 100th anniversary. It was well known and well renowned for its quality, craftsmanship, price and competitiveness, but that was left behind.

That multinational corporation walked away from the community because we lacked an industrial policy that spoke to those corporations in a meaningful way, a policy that told them they must adhere to the rules of the game in Canada and that they could not simply walk away because they thought they could.

That was the unfortunate eventuality for those John Deere workers who had never been laid off. In fact, in our region it was one of only a few bright spots. It was hiring folks nine months before the closure announcement.

It is regrettable we do not have an industrial policy that ensures those sorts of things do not happen. However, notwithstanding it has now happened, we need to ensure we have protection for those workers so they are covered by employment insurance. We need to ensure, as they head into uncertain times, that they will be covered, that they will be protected and that they will be able to stay in their communities and continue to raise their families in those communities that they so cherish.

[Employment Insurance Act, November 3rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague is absolutely right. There are gaps in the system. I hate to be redundant and repeat myself, but it was his party, when in government, that actually gave us the gaps we see today. If we are to pretend that somehow the gaps materialized because of Bill C-50, then we are mistaken. At best, this is trying to paper over a small piece of a large gap.

What needs to happen is what I said earlier, and I have said this before in the House. We need review unemployment insurance, now called employment insurance, from top to bottom. At the end of the day, if we do not, we will be constantly trying to paper over the gaps. There will be losers across this land and we will never get to the root cause in the sense of being able to effect and help those who are unemployed.

Papering over the gaps will not work. We simply need to continue to work to ensure the system works for all Canadians.

[Employment Insurance Act, November 3rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, in speaking to Bill C-50 it is always difficult to, as my colleague from the Bloc said, pick winners and losers, and no question the bill does that. There are some winners in the bill and clearly there are those who are going to lose including a lot of my personal friends. They work for the Canadian auto workers in my region and whom I have worked with for a number of years. They will not benefit from this bill. There is no question about that.

Because of what we saw in past years with the number of layoffs and what we have seen prior to the enactment of this bill, they will not be covered. It is just that simple.

In saying that, we do not have unfortunately a sense within the House that we can go back and take a comprehensive look and review the entire system of employment insurance. What has happened is we have been piecemealing the system since it was reviewed in the 1990s. When it was reviewed in the 1990s, it was a review to gut it. That gutting of the employment insurance system, under the Liberal government, has given us what we have today; a patchwork quilt of help across the country that should indeed cover all of us and it does not.

What is happening now is we are adding bits here, adding bits there, we do not like this one, we do not like that one, and people move from this one to that one.

My own private member's bill that would have made sure that severance and vacation pay would have been kept by unemployed workers when they collected employment insurance was defeated by the Liberals. They chose to have that bill defeated.

Yet, the Liberals stand in their place and say that they want to reform the system. When they have the opportunity, they do not take the opportunity, which is really regrettable.

We need a comprehensive review. We need to ensure that employment insurance protects the unemployed. That is what it is meant to do. That is why workers pay the premium. They pay it because they believe, as workers, that if the eventuality falls upon them that they are unemployed, they will be able to collect EI benefits.

The bill will do that for a certain group of workers, but not all workers unfortunately. It will not protect those laid off in 2008. It will not add on those who have unfortunately had the misfortune of being laid off for numerous weeks over previous years through no fault of their own. That is regrettable. No one who is laid off can collect from the system voluntarily because one does not choose to be laid off. Employers choose to lay off workers.

Consequently, if workers choose to leave their jobs, they do not qualify at all. To punish those who are laid off through no fault of their own is erroneous from the get go. It is egregious at best.

One needs to look at EI in its totality, not in a piecemeal quilt but that is what we are doing. That does not serve workers in the country and it does not serve the unemployed.

However, this bill will indeed help some. In my riding John Deere workers were laid off in 2009 when their plant closed and moved to Mexico even though it was a profitable plant. It was making money for that corporation and it just simply decided to get up and leave. Those workers, as they head into 2010 and exhaust their benefits, will be the recipients of the help in this bill. That is a good thing for them.

Unfortunately, the workers at Henniges, which is about two kilometres away, who were laid off in 2008 will receive nothing from the bill. They too would have worked for long periods of time. It was a plant that continued to work for long periods of time and did not experience layoffs, similar to the Deere plant workers.

Unfortunately, we will have on the one hand one group protected and on the other hand one group not protected. That is the difficulty with trying to bring together one piece at a time into a comprehensive melding of things to make this work. That is why it does not.

As we look to ensure that unemployed workers are covered we need to start looking at it from a comprehensive perspective, so that we actually are going to reform the system, not add one layer of complexity on to another and take one out from underneath.

My colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley asked a question about $2 billion being put in the fund as we head into this new independent, arm's length body that will adjudicate the fund. Clearly, $2 billion versus $57 billion that was already there is inadequate. That is why we piecemeal systems because we do not fund them appropriately.

Yet workers and employers believe they funded it appropriately. They duly paid their premiums over a number of years and built up that surplus. We saw the surplus evaporate before our very eyes through the Conservative and Liberal governments' mismanagement of that fund. They simply spent it, and now we have to dip into general revenues to pay the unemployed.

I see the parliamentary secretary shaking his head. He is right. General revenue is now having to back up the unemployment fund. The governments had a surplus that was squandered, and I do not say that flippantly. Those two parties decided they would spend it on something other than the unemployed. That money rightfully belonged to the unemployed.

It is shameful that the unemployed are now asking why the system is not working for them. I do not think it does not work for them because people are trying to be nasty. The refrain is we do not have enough money, although we used to have enough. Someone decided to spend it elsewhere and that is regrettable. We have a premium freeze for the next little while and as we head out of it, we will ask workers to pay more.

My hope is that by the time they are asked to pay more, they get a comprehensive review of the system so if they are eventually laid off five years after paying their money, the money will be there again for them, not squandered like it was the last time.

As we can see, the bill will cover some workers. The number is 190,000. The numbers and dollar figures are bandied about. Is it $935 million? Is it $1 billion? No one knows for certain. Certainly the department and the commission are making some sense of what it might be and who it might be cover based on some other statistics. We will not know until the uptake. What we do know is workers out there need the help.

Most economists say that we may see a jobless recovery into 2010. If that is the case, we know people will be unemployed. Those who started their unemployment this year will be unemployed next year. How many is the debate. We do not know. I think that all of us in the House could agree on one thing. If it is not 190,000, but 150,000 or 100,000 because the other 90,000 have work, that will be a good thing. I do not think any of us in the House would say that is a bad. We will know they have jobs. They will be earning a living, putting money into the community and looking after their families. No one really wants to collect unemployment insurance.

When one thinks about it, workers only get 55¢ on the dollar. I am certain most members in the House would not want to make 55% of their wages. That is what the unemployed get when they are laid off. No one wants to be unemployed to make less money. They would rather work.

As we work through this system, this will help a certain segment of workers across the country. There will be regions, and the Bloc quite rightly points out that there are sectors within Quebec, that will not get covered. The forestry sector has been taking a hit for a long time. The vast majority of those workers will not be protected. The vast majority of auto workers in Ontario will not be protected either because of what they have suffered.

However, workers across the country may not always be in all of our ridings. There may be a few here and a few there. I am fairly certain there are a few workers in every riding. There will be pockets throughout the country that are larger than others. This is a national program. This is meant for all of us. This is meant to ensure we get protection across the country, no matter where.

Workers can be laid off in one region and move to another to try to seek work, while they collect unemployment insurance. It is a national program that we all used to cherish. We want to cherish it again as workers. We need to work hard in this place to ensure the system, as it goes forward, works like it did before the reforms came in the 1990s under the Liberal government. We need to ensure it works for workers and protects workers in their time of need. We need to ensure it is no longer what it is today, which is a patchwork quilt of protections across this land.

[Employment Insurance Act, November 3rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to seek unanimous consent to split my time with the hon. member for Windsor West.