Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to participate in this debate today and surely the chickens are coming home to roost.
If the parliamentary channel were to be seen in the other place, and I do not mean heaven-and it probably is for hours and hours of the day-you could bet one thing. All those Liberals, and the place would be full of them, would be rolling over in their graves right now. What we are talking about is how we are going unscramble an omelette. How are we going to make right what the Liberals did 35 years ago in order to buy their power and success with our money? That is what is all boils down to.
We, ladies and gentlemen in television land, are the ones who brought this upon ourselves. The Liberals and the Conservatives, in order to get re-elected or elected, determined the best way to do it was to buy us with our own money. The chicken has come home to roost. Our responsibility, this Parliament, I and my colleagues, are charged with the great responsibility to somehow do this to keep our country whole and to ensure that future generations of Canadians grow up in a spirit and attitude of confidence, self-worth and self-respect.
How are we going to do it? My hon. colleague from Elliot Lake talked about ham and eggs which reminded me of story of a pig and a chicken walking down the road. They are walking down the road and the pig said to the chicken: "Chicken, I am getting a little hungry". The chicken said: "So am I. Do you think we should stop for breakfast?". The pig asked: "What do you think we should have?". The chicken said: "Why don't we have ham and eggs?". The pig thought for a minute and said: "Chicken, when you say ham and eggs, the eggs from you are a donation, from me the ham is a commitment". That is what Canadians need and are looking for today. They are looking for commitment.
There is absolutely nothing as disheartening as going into a period of uncertainty and looking at the captain of the ship and the captain is looking at somebody else to lead. Our country is on stormy waters even as we speak. We need a government, we must have a government, that will take the initiative and do what it is paid to do, lead. The time for studying, navel gazing discussion is long past. We are in serious trouble today and dreaming about it and wishing are not going to change a thing.
There may be some of us here in this House who do not agree with the American philosopher Ayn Rand, but I think all of us would agree with at least this one truism, that you must deal with things as they are, not as you would wish them to be. If we reflect in our daily lives, we know that no matter how difficult the situation we may face from day to day, the minute that we start dealing with the problem it starts getting better.
We know what the problems are in our economy. We know what got us here. Surely we know that the first step is the most difficult to get us out of this mess and that is the chronic overspending of all levels of government.
I would like to spend a few minutes talking about one aspect of this social policy review, unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance started 35 or so years ago with the noblest of intentions. The idea was that unemployment insurance would help those who lost their jobs tide them over until they were to get a new job. It is a noble idea. Who would disagree with that? It was to be paid for by the people who would use it-insurance. It would be paid for by the companies that hired employees, and employers.
When unemployment insurance started in Canada it consumed 0.9 per cent of our gross domestic product.
That is, of the value of all the goods and services that were produced in our country, unemployment insurance was 0.9 per cent. In 1992-93 unemployment insurance was 3 per cent of our gross domestic product. It had increased from $60 million a year to around $20 billion. No one got up one morning and said we should turn unemployment insurance into something that is not going to work, or will not be what we wanted it to be in the first place.
It gradually, incrementally, took on other responsibilities. It became a method whereby we were able to redistribute income throughout the nation. As it stands today all across the country dependent upon the unemployment rate, it is possible to get unemployment insurance. For instance, in a place with 16 per cent unemployment I think one needs to work 10 weeks a year to get approximately 39 weeks of benefits. If the unemployment in Canada averages 10 per cent, people need to work for, I believe, 15 weeks to get 30 weeks of benefits. It has absolutely no relation to insurance.
Now we have a suggestion in this book-whatever its colour-to change the name, to call it employment insurance. Think about it for a minute. We do not like what unemployment insurance has become, so let us change the name. Let us call it employment insurance. Why do we not call it unfire insurance then? Or let us call it uncollision insurance. Let us do whatever we have to do, but for goodness sake let us not deal with the problem as it is.
Let us obfuscate the problem. Let us somehow bury the problem so we do not have to deal with it as it is. The Forge commission years ago was charged with exactly this responsibility, to make unemployment insurance unemployment insurance. What did we as parliamentarians do? We decided the Canadian people were not ready for these radical reforms such as pay as you go, and it was put back on the shelves.
We do not have to go into a great navel gazing exercise in order to figure out what is wrong with unemployment insurance. All we have to do is make it insurance. There are two aspects to this. There is the aspect of the employer and the employee. Our system has become so generous and so easy to get into that employers, when faced with the decision of letting someone go, find it much easier to look someone in the eye and say "we are laying you off, we do not have enough work", than it is to say "you are out of here because a) you do not show up on time, b) you have not made an effort when you are here, c) you do not groom yourself properly" or whatever.
It is much easier to say "we are going to lay you off". What does that do? That is a tax on everybody else who is working. Does that do anything for the person being fired? It does absolutely nothing.
When someone in our unemployment insurance maze happens for whatever reason to get laid off or perhaps fired, what happens? When people are laid off through no fault of their own, the waiting period is fairly short and they are able to claim benefits right away, as it should be. When people quit they are supposed to be in a situation in which they cannot claim benefits for an extended period of time. They can still claim benefits but it takes a while.
In reality what happens? An employer fires someone and so they go to their local unemployment insurance office and say they were fired. They are asked why they were fired. The person replies: "I do not know. I should not have been fired. I am the greatest employee ever ".
They therefore go to the referee. The person who fired them has to go through a long and involved process of saying why they fired them. Then they have to go to a committee of three people to justify it. Otherwise the person has recourse to say that he or she was laid off.
All this does not do anything to strengthen the insurance aspect of what we are talking about. It would be relatively simple in many of the great problems we have if we boiled it down to some very straightforward essentials.
A basic mandate in everything we do is that it must be fair and have equity. Fairness and equity must be the underlying values in everything we do in social policy review including unemployment insurance. We must inculcate with everyone-employer, employee, parent and child-a sense of personal responsibility for our successes and our failures in life.
If we were to do so, we would go a long way in establishing a sense of self-sufficiency, self-confidence and self-worth in ourselves as individuals. It is up to everyone as individuals to make their way in life; it is not up to the government to do it for anyone.