Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good day and thank you for being here to provide your expertise and contribute to the debate and the research we are currently doing.
When we talk about older workers, two problems arise. The problem we tackle regularly is keeping older workers on the job who are still employable and for whom there are jobs. I think older workers will agree. People who have worked all their lives have learned to work. It is part of what gives meaning to their lives. I will come back to that.
The ones I would like to speak for now are those for whom there is no longer any alternative. For them, you might say a Gordian knot appears every time they approach the government and, often, employers. They are people who can no longer work for purely objective reasons. They have reached the end of their ability to work. I will give you the example a woman talked about earlier.
Just recently, I met with forty or so women who had all worked in fish plants for more than 40 years. They started working there at 15, 16 or 17 years old. They are now between 50 and 60 years old. Some 40 of the women I met had all started work at the same time and were no longer able to work. They told me they were given three months of work a year, and those months of work became synonymous with hard labour. They did not want to hear of going to work elsewhere; they are no longer capable of it. They worked all their lives wearing rubber boots, in the damp, constantly moving 25 to 30 lb loads, often up to 2,000 lbs a day. So their backs are in bad shape.
What do we do with those people? How do we support them? They are people who, objectively speaking, can no longer work because of their physical condition.
Just as objectively, other people find themselves in a similar situation. I’m thinking of people like the women who worked at the Whirlpool plant in Rivière-du-Loup, where they manufactured stoves all their lives. However, the company closed down. They are people who are still capable of working. They did not work as hard as the women I talked about earlier, but they are no longer able to find a job. The plant has been closed for two years. There were about fifty workers there over 55 years old. Two of them have committed suicide. They don’t want us to talk about it but we must. After two years, there is no more employment insurance; there is nothing any more.
I will give you the example of a 57-year-old man who was provided two years of training paid for by the government. He undertook the retraining and submitted 92 applications for employment. He got an interview and was not selected because he was too old, he was told. He is an intelligent, sturdy man, capable of working, who wants to work. He is discouraged. I don’t know what has become of him. I could give you many similar examples.
Those are two objective situations where older workers cannot work. What do we do with them? The government objects to granting them income support. It does not make sense. What is left for them? Social assistance. After social assistance, what is left for them? To obtain social assistance benefits, they have to spend all the income they have earned. Often, it is not much, even though it is a whole life’s work. I am going to stop there.
I would ask the people who represent employers, including Mr. Kymlicka and the small business representative: What do we do with the people I talked about earlier? Do we ignore them or do we help them out, knowing that the employment insurance fund has a surplus every year?