Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First, I'd like to thank you for travelling here to make a presentation to us. I come from a rural area in northern New Brunswick. So I understand that it's a fairly difficult task for you to come here, with the traffic there is in Toronto. So I want to thank you for coming.
I'd like to talk with Mr. Deenen and Mr. Santacruz on the issue of seasonal jobs. We talk about seasonal employees, but in fact it's the jobs that are seasonal. I'd like your comment on the need to try to train people so they can work throughout the year. Yes, we can dream. Yes, we can hope to do that, but the reality is quite different. There isn't really any magic solution.
When you train someone so that he can work year-round, he'll probably leave the seasonal work place to go and work indoors. That means that the small businesses in the industry you represent — and perhaps there are some bigger ones — will find it hard to retain their employees. When you get into this situation, what happens the following year? You have to start over and find new employees to fill their positions. In addition, you have to train those new employees because this is a new job for them. So that becomes a problem.
I'd like to hear what you have to say on those two points. You say the employment insurance system has to be improved. In the last Parliament, with my government, I implemented the best weeks policy. That concerned the 14 best weeks of the 52 previous weeks during which people had worked. Instead of taking the last weeks, we took into account the best 14 weeks in the previous year. That was applied in the regions where the unemployment rate was high, where it was 10% or more.
First, in your view, would it be important for this initiative that was implemented in 2005 to be applied nationally in order to help industries such as yours, to allow them to keep their employees and not to penalize employees because their work ends?
Second, since the start of the new Parliament, I have introduced a private member's bill on the elimination of the two qualifying weeks in the context of the employment insurance system. Do you believe that could help you retain your present employees over the next few years?