What a surprise, Mr. Chair!
Here we are dealing with the Social Security Tribunal of Canada and the way the tribunal was set up. How? With a new omnibus bill. In this case, they want to add members to the tribunal, which clearly was not designed in a way that made it possible to do the work that all the appeal organizations did beforehand, including the boards of referees. Now the situation has deteriorated to the point that more than 14,000 Canadians are waiting to be heard by this tribunal.
These are vulnerable Canadians, because we are talking about employment insurance in particular and old age security. In cases like that, people have little or no income. They are the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled. Instead of getting rid of the delays, as they should, the Conservatives have decided to save a nickel here and a dime there, which explains why 40% of the cases settled so far by the Social Security Tribunal of Canada did not even get a hearing.
With these provisions, the government is finally eliminating an arbitrary limit on the number of members of the tribunal. But the fact remains that, for 18 months, the Conservative government has not even appointed all the members it could have appointed under the current act. Adding members under this provision will not solve the entire problem. What are needed are better rules for the tribunal and, above all, a better process.
Because of all the delays that have occurred because of the Social Security Tribunal of Canada's poor structure and the fact that adding members will help fill that gap, we are going to vote in favour of this clause. We still deplore the way in which the tribunal was established and the negative impact that the amendments have had on all the appeal processes.
We will vote for this clause, but we still point out all the problems that creating this tribunal brought with it.