Thank you very much.
As a result of the short notice, I haven't been able to get you any written material, but I undertake to do so in a timely fashion.
Thank you for having a look at this topic. I think the entire EI system needs to be looked at, but this is a great place to start.
I come from the construction, fabrication, and maintenance industry. We represent about 500,000 Canadians, 8% of all direct employment in Canada, and 14% of Canada's GDP. It's an industry that is transitory for both employers and workers. Every construction job ends. It is not unusual to have several employers over the course of a year, and it is extremely and highly unusual to ever have a career with one employer. The industry conforms to this characteristic of worker mobility both in its training structure and in the hiring halls we use. Our work patterns aren't very well understood: we have long hours, few days off, with periods of unemployment in-between.
At the outset, let me say that it supposed to be employment “insurance”. When I went to law school, insurance was a contract of indemnity against a foreseeable event. If you are unemployed, that is the foreseeable event, and you ought to get something. It doesn't work that way in our business now.
Your request talks about the issue of denials and the issue of access. Sometimes—and I've laboured through this a lot—people say that it's easy: let's just go back to the past. I'm likely the only person here who has spent a bunch of time in my hometown at the board of referees for unemployment insurance, as it then was, and then employment insurance. The truth is that the board of referees has been replaced by a tribunal of people who can sit in their PJs at home, having a look at everything, having coffee, and looking at a pile of papers, most of which are supplied by the commission. It is a poor way to deal with the issue of appeals for EI.
You know, you need to be able to get.... Sometimes, inarticulate people need a chance to be able talk to a human being to find out what the story actually is. Having the board of referees allowed those people to develop some local expertise in things like urban and rural, seasonal, and distance.... It gave them an opportunity to have a couple of people there who knew something about hiring halls. It gave those people an opportunity to understand the local labour market and to have some knowledge.
It also allowed people to explain a reason: “I didn't take the one-week job because I was at the top of the out-of-work list, and if I waited another three days, I would get a job that lasted eight months”. People don't know how to express those things, and when they're sent into the current set of tribunals, it doesn't work. The system is supposed to function in the interests of the people who are actually the claimants who fund employment insurance.
We have a series of hiring halls. We have roughly 300 hiring halls across the country that dispatch people to go to work in various places. We're not the only unions that run hiring halls. Other groups of unions do as well. Theoretically, in the last review of EI, hiring-hall agreements were deemed to be acceptable and were preserved in place. It simply depends on where in Canada your hiring hall is located as to whether Service Canada thinks you have a valid hiring hall agreement or not.
The premise of the hiring hall is a pool of skilled people. Employers invest in those people, paying somewhere in the vicinity of 25¢ to $2.50 an hour to get the workers trained. We maintain an infrastructure of $750 million across the country and spend $300 million a year training people at 175 training centres. There's an enormous investment there.
Threshold training may come from the community college, but the union training centre does all the graduate-level training, specialist training, refresher training, upgrading, and supervisory leadership training. They do that to maintain a pool of skilled workers whom they can call on when they need them.
We do the job search for the workers. We share work through the hiring hall. This is of enormous value to our employers, who actually agree with us that this is something that needs to be preserved.
The second point is on denials. People who take training are supposed to be in receipt of special benefits under sections 12 and 25 of the act. That isn't always the case. What ends up happening frequently is that people who go through their apprenticeship have to use regular benefits in order to go through training. Those are four or five periods of apprenticeship training. They have to use their regular benefits, not special benefits. When they get a journeyman certificate and enter the industry as full-fledged participants, they're already frequent users of EI. This doesn't work.
At the end of the day, we are still going to lose 25% of the construction industry in the next seven years. The baby boom generation is going to retire. We need to get access for people. The regional system of EI doesn't work very well. If you live in southern New Brunswick, you need 600-plus hours to qualify for 17 weeks' benefit. If you're a half a mile north, in northern New Brunswick, it's 300 hours over 52 weeks. This doesn't make sense.
We'll send you some material. I'll answer any questions you have.
Thank you very much for undertaking this. It looks to me like it's the start of a major review of EI, which is something that needs to happen. EI should not be an ideological football. It should be a principle-based system.