I'm president of the Cape Breton Island Building and Construction Trades Council. We have more than 4,000 members there, and affiliated across the country we have 450,000 to 500,000 unionized building trades workers. As my counterpart has said, in the construction industry our members are beneficiaries of the EI program, because nobody would build anything if they didn't think they were going to finish it. Automatically, at some point, we're going to wind up on unemployment.
I have a concern over the $2 billion initial funding of the Canada Employment Insurance Financing Board. I don't think that's enough. I've been in the construction business for more than 40 years. I've seen during the course of that time several deep recessions in the construction industry. There were a lot of unemployed people. I would agree with the Auditor General and the chief actuary for EI, who suggested that between $10 billion and $15 billion would be a more realistic figure for an amount this board needs to break even in the case of a recession.
Also, I would like to know if the Government of Canada is going to benefit from any profits that come out of the investment of the funds, similar to Export Development Canada and the Business Development Bank profits from the investments that go to the Government of Canada. I would like to see this board be a stand-alone board with the funds that come into it staying in it and the interest that's accumulated staying in it. If there's any kind of profit or excess, it should be dealt with through reduced premiums or a holiday in premiums, to give our contractors a competitive edge in this global economy.
On other issues, we see that the construction business in this country is about 12% of the GDP. We would like somebody from industry on this board: somebody from the management side and somebody from the union side. The CLC, of course, will be here looking for a position. We think that the building trades in Canada should be sitting at this table, on this board, because we're big beneficiaries of both part 1 and part 2 programs.
There is another reason we're here. In the building trades, in the defined benefit plans for industrial plants that are unionized, generally under those circumstances the owners control the pension funds and the money, so most of the industrial unions don't get involved as trustees. In the construction industry we have multi-employer plans, we're jointly trusteed, and we would say that we have a lot more experience than the industrial unions. We would like to see somebody here who knows about investing in pension plans, because there's billions of dollars in the construction industry in this country being invested, and the trustees who are there have to do a good job. They have experience and training. Most of them have taken advanced training management courses in the investment of pension funds.
I was shocked when this thing went through in March. It's a whole change to the social fabric of the country. I was shocked that there wasn't more talk about it in the House.
On the part 2 training, as you know, in 1996 Jean Chrétien kind of gave up training nationally and was going to turn that over to the provinces. I think he wanted to keep Quebec happy at the time. Well, prior to that there were regional industrial training committees, and people in the local areas had a say in where the money would go. We'd like to see some of that $54 billion go to training people. There are shortages in the country. There are people who fell through the cracks in this country.
Not too long ago, we put natives and black people who didn't have grade 12 through a course, and we successfully got them into an apprenticeship. We had to fund that ourselves. I don't think industry should be looking at that.
All this money is a big surplus. We think it shouldn't just go into a black hole somewhere and bring foreigners to the country. We should be using that money to train people.
I'd like to know what powers this board is going to have to fix things like the EI rates. From 1989 to now, I think the benefits have gone up by about $20. If you took a family with one wage earner and two kids, that four hundred and some dollars a week is below the poverty line.
We really don't want to see this $54 billion disappear into oblivion and wind up with this ridiculous $2 billion being offered to this committee. This committee is going to need a lot more money to do the job that has to be done in this country.
With that, I guess I'll wrap it up.