Madam Speaker, Bill C-17, that ill-advised legislation of the Liberal government on unemployment insurance will affect three and a half million Canadians. Workers in Canada and Quebec who lost their jobs may not know it yet, but they also lost up to four months of benefits.
Workers are not and should not be considered as responsible for the lack of jobs and the long unemployment spells before they can find a new job.
By reducing benefits this government will only inflict greater suffering and poverty on the jobless, their families and their communities. Those reductions put the blame and the burden of unemployment on them, and that is unfair and morally unacceptable. Many jobless in my riding in the North End of Montreal, some of whom voted for the Liberals in the last election, are really angry about those kinds of antisocial and cruel policies.
But there is worse. The systematic attack by the Liberal government against the most vulnerable in our society, against the jobless is a disgrace.
Indeed, everybody remembers what the Prime Minister said when he was Leader of the Opposition. Posing as the champion of social rights, he decried the policies of the Conservatives who, with Bill C-105, attacked the unemployed instead of unemployment. Those are the very words of the Prime Minister. It is mind-boggling.
Furthermore, in the red book, which served as bible and election platform for the Liberal Party in the last campaign, we can read word for word on page 74: "The Tories have systematically weakened the social support network that took generations to build. Not only have they taken away billions of dollarsfrom. . . people who have lost their jobs, but they have set us on a path to becoming a polarized society, divided into rich and poor-"
Seeing how fast the federal government did exactly the opposite of what it promised and went even farther than the Conservatives in its attack on the most disadvantaged, we can rightly say that this government cynically misled the people for the sole purpose of getting elected.
In fact, not only has the government maintained the same immoral and punitive policy that it denounced when the previous government presented Bill C-105, but it has done worse.
Since the UI program was created 54 years ago, no change of this magnitude has ever been made. No government has ever taken such odious, retrograde and unjust measures against the very people this government publicly promised to help.
This project hits hardest regions where jobs are the most difficult to find. Indeed, the deepest cuts will be made in areas where the regional unemployment rate is the highest. So, in a city with a 6 per cent unemployment rate, a worker who is laid off after nine months will lose five weeks of benefits. But in Montreal, where the unemployment rate exceeds 13 per cent,
and also in the Maritimes, the reduction for the same employment period will be twice as big, that is a ten-week reduction.
The government seems to think that the system to which workers are contributing is being systematically abused by those people who most frequently rely on unemployment insurance. Hence, it considers some citizens as being less deserving than others, simply because they live in less fortunate areas of the country or work in seasonal industries. It is as if we were to refuse to give health insurance benefits to chronically ill people because they rely on the system more often than others.
For ten years I was a part-time arbitrator at the unemployment insurance office in Montreal. In that capacity, I witnessed numerous disturbing tragedies suffered by people who were seeing their benefits being cut off for different reasons. These people who were already living under the poverty level were then forced to give up their home because, under these conditions, they were no longer able to pay their mortgage.
These human tragedies have increased and have become even more dramatic since April 1993, when Bill C-113 passed by the Conservative government was implemented.
The government should take into consideration the findings of a recent Gallup poll which sets at 70 per cent the number of people in Quebec who oppose this unemployment insurance reform which will certainly reduce the number of UI beneficiaries, but will increase by the same number the total of welfare recipients.
Reducing unemployment insurance payments, as the government is doing, will not give jobs to the men and women thrown out of the work force, even though the Minister of Finance is claiming that the 2.28 per cent reduction in UI premiums for employers will create 40,000 jobs. If this screwy logic were true, all we would have to do would be to reduce the premiums by another 85 per cent to find jobs for all the unemployed in Canada.
In February 1993 already, 50,000 people braved an Abitibian cold of minus 25 to demonstrate against a similar bill tabled by former minister André Valcourt.
Yesterday, the caucus of the Bloc Quebecois received the major leaders of the FTQ-the Quebec Labour Federation-for which I worked for 19 years. They voiced their strong opposition to the cuts in social programs, and in particular to Bill C-17.
On May 1st of this year, the major Quebec unions will be holding a gigantic demonstration against the neo-conservative policies of the Liberal governments of Canada and Quebec. Rest assured, Madam Speaker, that I will be there.
The Canadian union movement-I conclude, Madam Speaker-is unanimous in its opposition to Bill C-17, and this includes the CLC which has 2.2 million members. For all these reasons, I will vote against the bill.