Thank you very much.
I'm here on behalf of the Canadian Labour Congress, which is the national voice of 3.3 million unionized workers in Canada. Our affiliated unions' members work in virtually all sectors of the Canadian economy, in all occupations, and in all parts of Canada.
As you know, in the near term the macroeconomic picture for Canada appears bleak. Fortunately, Canada has a comparatively strong fiscal position and has ample fiscal room to undertake significant long-term investments in public, physical, and social infrastructure. The federal government has a historic opportunity to make targeted and strategic investments in infrastructure that will lift long-term productivity growth while also repairing a portion of the badly frayed social safety net that Canadians rely on.
We have provided the clerk with a longer brief outlining some of our priorities for building a fairer and more prosperous Canada. Given the time constraints, I will focus my comments on infrastructure, training, and employment insurance.
The Canadian Labour Congress absolutely supports the federal government's plan to invest in physical and social infrastructure. In the short term, infrastructure spending, housing investments, and transfers to low-income households carry the highest stimulus multipliers, with relatively small leakages to savings or to imports. We recommend that all infrastructure spending should consider the necessity of a transition to a green economy. There's enormous potential here to create good jobs and build for the future.
In fact, the labour movement in Canada has developed a plan that would create one million climate jobs over five years. That would put us on track to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by one-third in a decade. This plan includes just, fair transition commitments and labour adjustment mechanisms. The three priority infrastructure areas that we've identified in this plan are energy efficiency, public transit, and renewable energy. These investments will help us achieve our greenhouse gas reduction goals and provide good jobs for workers.
In addition, we urge the federal government to invest in a green jobs skills training program to ensure that workers are equipped and available to perform the energy-efficiency home and building retrofits that are needed to reduce energy consumption. This is the lowest-hanging fruit we have. The biggest difference we can make is in energy efficiency. We have people who are mostly trained to do these things, but with a little bit of additional training, they can be rerouted from jobs they've lost in the oil sands, for instance, to jobs in energy efficiency. To this end, we encourage the federal government to develop a green skills fund in advance of anticipated federal transfers for new infrastructure investments.
Federal infrastructure projects are also a perfect opportunity for the federal government to work with unions, industry leaders, and the Assembly of First Nations to remove barriers and create opportunities for women and other under-represented groups in skilled trades.
I want to second what was said earlier, which was that within infrastructure there is a very special requirement for first nations. Federal funding for drinking water and sanitation in indigenous communities should be a high priority for this government. It is unacceptable that in a nation as wealthy as ours, this critical necessity is not available to everyone.
The labour movement also encourages the federal government to ensure that social infrastructure investments, such as child care and health care, are provided publicly, and to implement uniform national standards.
With regard to employment insurance, we urge the government to act swiftly on their commitment to eliminate the current 910-hour eligibility hurdle for new entrants and re-entrants to the labour market and to reverse the 2012 changes that were punitive to unemployed workers.
We would also like to bring it to your attention that cuts to front-line services have meant long delays in accessing benefits for many unemployed workers, particularly in the west, surprisingly, and in Atlantic Canada. We urge an immediate allocation of $100 million in 2016-17 to the EI program in order to improve processing times and reduce delays in appeals and reconsideration-of-benefits decisions.
We note that there will be an accumulated surplus in the employment insurance account in 2016 and ask that the government use this surplus to implement these promises immediately, in their first budget.
Thank you very much.