I do not think the bill per se gives more power to other workers or employers. It is simply intended to do justice to workers who make contributions for 30 years and, in some cases 40 years, and who need protection when a company shuts down.
If a company that is in financial difficulty decides one day to force its workers to strike or locks them out in order to protect itself and try to turn things around, well, workers have no control over that. The bill is simply intended to do justice to those workers.
For example, someone who is in prison—this is strange—is entitled to 104 weeks of benefits. That is well established. But it is different for a worker who is on strike or has been locked out.
We have just been through a lockout that lasted more than three years, that workers had absolutely no control over. There were small businesses in the area. Some people, while their colleagues were making sure that no other workers would take their place, went out into the surrounding communities to collect “Employment Insurance stamps”—that is the expression they use. They set up a rotation.
On the other hand, some 180 workers were unable to find jobs in the surrounding area, the closest town being 170 kilometers away. So, the company shut down and the workers do not have access to EI. How much do you think their houses are worth now that the company has shut down and there is no other business in the region?
These people paid $150,000 or $200,000 for their homes in an isolated area. They have ended up with houses that are only worth $30,000 or $40,000, in some cases, even though the original value was $150,000. So, they lost everything and yet they had no control over any of it.
And this sort of thing does not only happen in Lebel-sur-Quévillon. It can happen anywhere. In a large urban centre like Montreal or Toronto, 425 workers is a drop in the bucket. The fact is that some of those workers might be able to again qualify for Employment Insurance, depending on their skills, by working in small businesses in the surrounding area; but everyone is not able to do that.
Why penalize a worker when the company he worked for did not want to lay people off, or was not honest enough to make those layoffs at the time it was shutting down? That would not prevent the company from negotiating a return to work, if the closure turned out not to be final. If it closed temporarily, workers could still exercise the rights they acquired over all those years. However, that did not happen.