Mr. Speaker, I really only need about five more minutes. I appreciate the co-operation of members.
It really is perverse for the green paper even to consider making unemployment insurance more difficult to get and indeed for the benefits to be further reduced.
It seems bizarre that we were focused on that as a solution to the problem, again continuing to blame the unemployed for their unemployment.
We need changes that would make unemployment insurance more encompassing with about 50 per cent of the population now being self-employed. Outside that system, we need to find a way though not easy to include them within the unemployment insurance system. We also need to include those part-timers who are not now included in the unemployment system.
We need to look for creative ways to ensure that all Canadians who need assistance are provided with it. Again we are seeing the emphasis on training but training out of funds which would otherwise go to those Canadians who are unemployed who need the resources to feed their families.
We still have to ask the question: Training for what? Are we really going to successfully train four million Canadians to re-enter the work place? That is simply unrealistic.
With regard to child benefits, we have here another suggestion that perhaps we should increase child benefits. Indeed the numbers suggested are to double them.
While that is fine as far as it goes, it is obviously much better for a child to have $2,500 to $3,000 a year than only $1,200, but this will basically merely delay the visits to the food bank by two or three days in a month. This will not address the problem and we cannot keep addressing problems in this band-aid way, responding to some of the symptoms of the problem.
Children are poor because they are born to poor parents. Their parents are poor because they do not have the means to feed their families simply because they do not have work.
The last point I would like to make with regard to the more specific proposals in the paper is with regard to post-secondary education. This really is a very perverse approach by the federal government. We all talk about and we all agree that a better educated, more trained, higher skilled work force is important in the new economy.
We would then anticipate if we all believe that that we will find ways to make post-secondary education more accessible and not less accessible. It really is difficult to understand how the government feels that by making tuition fees higher, perhaps five or six times as high, by increasing student loans from what are already difficult burdens for students to what would be almost insurmountable burdens and by reducing accessibility to post-secondary education, that possibly can move us toward a better trained, more educated work force. The opposition found the education community indicative of the problems with that.
Let me just close by suggesting two or three things which we really should do to address the problems that this green paper is attempting to address.
The real solution can only be to ensure that more Canadians are working, to develop the environment within the economy to ensure that good quality jobs are created and that there are enough of them to satisfy the demand. We have a long way to go on that. Other countries have been much better at that than we have. We really need a national consensus on how to move forward to ensure that all Canadians who can work will be able to work.
We also need to look at tax reform. We cannot continue to give $15 billion worth of tax breaks to those who can invest in RRSPs while children go to food banks. It is simply not possible. We have difficult choices to make as all members have suggested. That may be a difficult choice for the economy but we can clearly ensure a reduction in the deficit and an ability to fund more effectively our social programs if we look at serious, fair and progressive tax reform.
There are many innovative things we can do within the workplace itself. We can look at shorter working hours and overtime restrictions to share the work that is there. If four million Canadians are not working and another eight million are, it does not seem to me to be very effective to ensure that those numbers can continue.
There have been successes as we have seen in other countries with efforts to deal with that problem and indeed voluntary efforts on the part of trade unions and employers to move toward shorter working weeks. We have constantly done that. In past history people used to work seven days a week and now they work five days a week.
In closing I think this is a debate about the quality of Canadian life, about our collective responsibility to one another, about inequality and ensuring that social policy responds to deep insecurities, changing family structures, high poverty levels and great insecurity in the work force.
We have a lot of work today and I do not think this paper takes us very far along the way.