As I said previously, I had a bill that looked at the whole problem when I did my tour across the country. My friend Mr. Lake asked if I spoke to the employers. I went across the country. I went to 22 municipalities and 53 public meetings announced in advance. So I went across the country, as you will see in my book.
The two-week waiting period is something that the workers asked about: why should I be punished, and why should my family be punished, for two weeks when I didn't quit my job, I got laid off? So at the end of the day, you have to look at where you put the priority. If you don't quality at all, you have to ask what the two weeks means.
The first one I used for the bill, which came from section 10 of the act, was, I felt, a priority. If only 32% of women are qualifying for EI and only 38% of the men are qualifying--and as I keep saying, they are paying into it--the priority should be to resolve that first. If we use the amount that the government has used, $1.2 billion or $1.4 billion, it's not much, in a program of $15 billion, to resolve it. If that's what resolves the problem, it's not much.
I have to comment here that in this budget they talk about the premiums only. I'm not surprised; when the Conservatives were the opposition, the only thing they talked about was the premiums. They were more interested in big business not paying any premiums than about working people. At no time did I ever hear how we could fix this to help the working person except, “Well, if we're too generous, they won't want to go to work.”
This is bull. This is not true. People are not lazy. People want to work. People work hard. And they're not the ones who decide if they're going to work or not, it's the employer. As a matter of fact, when the employer gives him a call saying, “Look, the job is starting next Monday, so now you can come back to work”, and he says no, and won't go to work, then his employment insurance is cut right away. The safety net is there for that.
This one here is to make sure we have a program that belongs to the worker and to business, and not to the government. In the one about the premium, the danger is that a crown corporation, when the premium is being set, will continue with the wish they have to bring the premium down; the premium will continue to go down; and then we will say, “Now we're not going to have employment insurance anymore because we don't have any money to pay into it.”
The money that's paid by the workers is money that they don't mind paying. In a previous study that we did, workers said they didn't mind paying premiums if they were allowed to get their employment insurance.