Madam Speaker, many of us are newcomers in this House and we are here to try to improve the lot of our constituents. Unfortunately, unemployment plagues our country, especially in rural ridings.
In 1987, a Senate committee published a report containing frightening figures. That was one of the rare occasions in which the Senate was useful. Do you know what they said? They said that keeping someone on unemployment was more expensive for the government than creating a job for him or her. According to this report, in 1985, an unemployed person earned an average of $14,040 a year before losing his job.
Once on unemployment, the same person received more than $14,645 in various benefits from the three levels of government. That means that when a potential unemployed person works, he or she costs $14,040 in salary and produces $14,040 in goods and services.
So, society gets something back for the salary paid to that person. When, on the contrary, we pay that person to produce nothing, there is no benefit for the community. Where is this government's logic? Does it really care about the dignity of men and women?
The recent budget of the Minister of Finance shows that he does not care at all about the reality I just described.
Since 1968, the cost of unemployment has equaled the national debt. None of the measures put forward by previous governments, neither new technologies nor export expansion nor reducting the size of government, could make a dent in the unemployment rate.
There are solutions. It is only by putting the unemployed back to work that we will succeed in reducing the deficit. And it is only by creating jobs that we will stimulate growth without causing inflation to rise.
The solutions are within our grasp, but we must have the will to implement them. This inaction has terrible consequences for the people.
Allowing people to stay idle is to strip them of their dignity, to tie their hands and feet and leave them in the dark, to make them
suffer. Allowing people to stay idle is also to drive them to rebellion, to violence and to suicide.
In my riding, during the election campaign, some people committed suicide because they had been jobless for five years. Two brothers went around and knocked on every door. They were told everywhere that there were no openings. I thought that this would stop with the new government. But in my riding, there are other problems. It is a rural area, an area where unemployment is even higher than elsewhere, and you have no idea of the kinds of problems that unemployment can create in some families.
Finally, forcing people to become unemployed is to force them and their whole family to live in shame. It is not only the unemployed themselves, but their whole family, their whole environment.
Would it not be more profitable for all communities to give work to everybody at a minimum wage? I ask the question. Of course, there are some problems with a minimum wage, but it is a solution that we should consider.
The Economic Council of Canada simulated the implementation of such a program under which, for the production of essential goods and the provision of essential services, unemployed people would get on average as much as they were making when they had a job. The Council even found that not only was this program workable, it would not increase inflation, nor the deficit, nor the tax rate.
Would it not be worth considering? Through such profitable programs, and without hurting organized labour-as everybody has the right to work-and without additional cost to the government, we could use these people to launch a national child care program and a home care service program for the elderly. How many senior citizens are in need of that service? We have nobody to send to help them.
Moreover, we could set up a genuine manpower development program. We could even launch a national program for the revitalization of poor neighbourhoods in our large cities. We could set up a program to help farmers deal with the new realities of the marketplace. As you know, farmers work very hard. They need labourers, but they do not have any.
In my district as elsewhere in the rural world, many people can create jobs. I will conclude with the words of our great poet, Félix Leclerc: "The best way to kill people is to pay them to do nothing". Paying people to do nothing. I think the government opposite is trying to organize something only temporarily because people are being asked to tighten their belts again. They will need twelve weeks of work to be entitled to UI benefits. When they do not receive UI benefits, they live on welfare, and that is how these people are being killed, in the end.