moved that Bill C-243, an Act to amend the Department of Labour Act (eligibility for assistance for long-service employees), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Madam Speaker, I will start by saying that since I had the pleasure of being elected to this House to represent the people of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, I never felt so strongly that I was speaking on a subject that is important for Montreal. It is important for Montreal, of course, but for other places as well, because the main purpose of the bill before hon. members of this House is to correct a terrible form of discrimination suffered by workers in Montreal and elsewhere.
I will have an opportunity to explain this discrimination in detail. First, with your permission, I would like to remind those listening to us this afternoon about POWA. This is not the first time that we have discussed POWA in this House. Members previously elected to Parliament, including the members for Saint-Léonard, Saint-Denis and Westmount-Saint-Henri, spoke many times in the past to call strongly for major improvements to POWA.
I am therefore pleased to speak because I agree with what my hon. colleagues said in the past. POWA is a federal-provincial agreement, financed 70 per cent by the central government and 30 per cent by the participating provinces. It seeks to compen-
sate and provide income support for laid-off workers. As you know, in these tough economic times, there are many lay-offs.
The joint federal-provincial agreement on POWA sets forth some criteria for workers to qualify. The agreement provides that workers will be eligible depending on the size of the municipality or community in which the company is located.
Let me give you the example of Montreal. When people are laid off in the Greater Montreal, something which has occurred a number of times in the past, the agreement provides that, to be eligible for POWA, a minimum of 100 workers must have been laid off. This is the first condition.
Consequently, before a worker can be eligible for the program on an individual basis, some important collective considerations related to the major change occurring, will determine whether that worker is eligible or not.
The second condition to qualify is that 8 per cent of laid off workers must be 55 or over. In Montreal, this criteria does not present great problems, compared to the rule requiring that a minimum of 100 workers be laid off. I will come back to this later on.
The Program for Older Worker Adjustment has been in existence since 1989. Quebec and seven other provinces have signed this agreement, which replaces the former Work Adjustment Training program, or WAT, more specifically targeted to the furniture industry and other traditional sectors. The proposed bill-and I point it out, because I feel it is important to do so-is designed to correct a terrible form of discrimination against urban centres with a population of over 500,000, including Montreal.
It is important to keep in mind this basic and unavoidable reality to understand what is going on in Montreal and what conditions must be met by a Montreal worker to be eligible in case of a mass lay-off-which, as you know, is a breach of contract on the employer's part-including the condition to the effect that at least 100 workers must have been laid off.
If you look at the lay-offs which have occurred in the recent past in Montreal, you see that they took place in very specific industries-textile, clothing and retail-which, of course, are not the only ones in trouble, but are nevertheless experiencing particular problems due to national and international factors.
I point this out is because between 70 and 80 per cent of these industries-textile, clothing and retail-are concentrated in Montreal. This is particularly true for the textile and clothing industries which, as you will recall, underwent a first stage of industrialization. When selecting a site for their facilities, this being one of the location factors to use an economic expression, most textile and clothing industries chose Montreal. This is why 70 to 80 per cent of those industries are now concentrated in the Montreal region. And this is where the problem lies since, on average, textile and clothing industries have 20, 25 or 30 employees.
It is so true-and I will have the opportunity to come back to this issue later-that 78 per cent of all requests submitted last year under POWA in the Montreal area were turned down, because workers were not eligible. And because this program is particularly unsuitable to the traditional industries and harmful to Montreal workers, a consensus was reached, a rare feat in our political system, and the Liberal Party in Quebec, through Mr. Bourbeau, formerly the minister of manpower, now the minister of finance, expressed its wish for a review of the program in order to bring the minimum of 100 down to 20. The Quebec government, first under Mr. Bourassa and now under Mr. Johnson, expressed its desire that this program be modified.
The same wish was expressed by the mayor of Montreal, the major central labour bodies and all the people who are somewhat concerned by Montreal's economic development and the minimum social justice workers are entitled to expect and who have noticed some problems with POWA. In a rare show of unanimity, all parties involved called for changes to this program.
And yet, this is the second version of POWA. A first agreement was signed in 1988 and renegotiated last year by the previous government, which was not, of course, a Liberal government. The Conservative government did not yield to all the demands of these people who know better than anybody else the real problems of Montreal's workers.
I have very concrete figures that will show to our colleagues how this POWA program is not suitable for Montreal's workers. The proof is that, in 1993-94, in the clothing industry, 75 businesses qualified, which means that their employees were eligible, and exactly 359 companies did not qualify because of the minimum of 100 workers.
Thus, there were four times more businesses that did not qualify than those that did, even if there were massive lay-offs. Four times more businesses could not ensure income support for their workers-I remind you that these workers are 55 years of age and more who have given 20, 25, 30 years of their lives to the labour force, the labour market, and their community-because of a stupid criterion which is not adapted to the situation in Montreal.
The same is true for the business sector. As you know, one of the realities of our modern economies is that the tertiary sector is becoming the main production sector and, in Montreal, according to the figures available for 1993-94, 41 commercial
businesses were declared eligible under POWA while 139 did not qualify.
So, three times more companies and three times more workers were excluded than included. That is nonsense and, out of consideration for the workers, the situation must be corrected. I repeat, because it cannot be overemphasized, all concerned agree. It is wrong for a worker in a desperate situation, which often may have drastic consequences over which he has no control, like a massive lay-off, to have to go through an eligibility determination process. His eligibility should not be based on the size of the municipality in which he lives.
The case of Steinberg shows how absurd these criteria are. We are all familiar with this case and we remember that workers in 13 of the 28 stores that should have qualified under POWA were in fact excluded. In the case of Steinberg, there is another factor that should be mentioned, namely that we were in a situation where there were two categories of employers.
Despite the fact that Steinberg was a chain that had various stores across Quebec, you will see, Madam Speaker, how absurd the situation was regarding the eligibility under POWA and you will feel sad about it. It is a situation that has to change. So, according to the criteria used, it was possible for a person who worked in a Steinberg store in Ville d'Anjou to qualify under POWA, whereas another Steinberg employee who worked in a Montreal store could be excluded.
You did not misunderstand, Madam Speaker. It was the same corporate organization, with the same employer, the same technologies, the same collective agreement, and the same supervision system, and we ended up with a totally unacceptable situation where workers were divided into two groups, with some people being excluded and others included. That is unacceptable from the point of view of social rights.
Why? Because, once more, eligibility depends on the size of the municipality where the production unit is located. Let us take the Steinberg situation. In the case of laid-off workers in Saint-Jérôme, there had to be 40 workers eligible to POWA if individual workers were to be compensated.
And for the same company, the same production unit, the same technology, and the same producer, if you were working for Steinberg in Longueuil, but still for the same company, the number of laid-off workers was 80 to become eligible.