My name is Steve McCuaig. I'm the national president for the Canada Employment and Immigration Union. I represent the workers who would actually deliver this service. I'm here to speak about the practicality of that idea in the bill. CEIU certainly is pleased to see a very thoughtful bill like this one, and we hope for the success of it.
With that in mind, our workers at Service Canada right now simply can't take on a whole lot more work without there being more of an investment in Service Canada. Over the last five years, we've seen our membership decrease by roughly 5,000 employee members. The workers who are there now have as much as they can handle; they can't do more. If in fact this is going to proceed, and from the looks of it, it is a bill that has a lot of support and looks like it's going to pass, and I commend the government for doing this, just be prepared for the implementation process. Make sure there are enough resources for the employees to do the job because, as Mr. Bishop has already expressed, it's a difficult time for Canadian citizens to be dealing with government when they're talking about someone who has passed on. Whether or not it's one department or several departments, if there's still any red tape whatsoever, it's not going to have the desired effect that this bill is intended to have.
As I said earlier, we've lost a large number of members. They need to have the ability to do their job. To do that they need the numbers that are required to do it. The recent cuts in all of the federal public services were done, in my opinion, in a way that didn't really put emphasis on where those cuts should have been made. They simply gave the direction to the senior management and senior management went and cut where they felt was the easiest. Oftentimes that's at the operational levels.
Right now our members who work the call centres are unable to address all of the calls that are coming in. At one point, I believe on the EI side of our business, there were only about 30% of the calls getting through. With CPP and OAS the numbers may be better, but not by much. If someone who is in dire straits is calling and calling and can't get through, then this bill, as well intended as it is, will not have the desired effect.
My reason for being here today is to speak about the need to increase the number of people that you have doing this work. It would add an incredible amount of workload. It's going to be a very specialized workload. For those reasons, not only would you have to invest in the resources in terms of human resources, but you would also have to invest in a training program that is robust and addresses all of the needs this bill intends to cover.
As you can see, I'm not here with prepared notes. These are all things that I have in my heart and I am pleased to be able to present this information to you.
I'm ready to receive questions.