One minute left? I’m going to go right to the conclusion.
Let’s go back to Judge LeBel of the Supreme Court. In his view, the fundamental reason to rule on the constitutionality of the amounts collected and accounted for was to maintain a connection in the act between the needs of the plan and a certain rate stability. These principles maintained an allocation policy, a balance in the collections that preserved their constitutional characteristics as regulatory collections. This action is based on the idea that the government can do what it wants with the cumulative surpluses in the employment insurance account. However, that claim was not allowed by the Supreme Court because appropriate accounting had been kept.
In conclusion, we consider that the government must abide by the Constitution. The section of Bill C-9 repealing the employment insurance account does not appear to be a legislative choice authorized by the Constitution of Canada in that it retroactively alters the nature of the amounts collected and entered in the account.
We demand that the planned increases in premium rates be used to restore the employment insurance plan, enabling it to adequately cover workers’ unemployment risk on a permanent basis, and we ask the House of Commons and the Senate to block the coming into force of this repeal of the employment insurance account—