Madam Speaker, the fundamental purpose and rationale for reorganizing the department is to put us in a position where we can take a holistic view of this transformation, try to put a finder on it that enables us to see the linkages and the crossovers.
We know full well that the problem of child poverty stems oftentimes from relationships in the workplace. We know that poor children also end up with children who have illnesses. Therefore we have to find some way of cross-linking the responses and in so doing be more effective and more efficient both within and between governments and provide the best possible answer in that respect. This means not abandoning basic values but finding new ways of doing things.
We have to recognize, a fundamental and critical issue, is that the old top down centralized hierarchies of governmental organization, which have been really a product of the old industrial age, no longer work effectively. The kind of management that is driven from a command point of view no longer works very effectively. We now must find a much different way of working in a society with individuals and communities, much more in a lateral and horizontal way than in a vertical way. The old manuals that governed inputs and outputs and measured results according to fiscal accounts no longer apply when it comes down to values.
I would like to point out one of the interesting initiatives we were able to co-sponsor with the OECD last spring. The secretary of labor in the United States and I made a motion that rather than have the OECD issue purely economic indicators every year it should begin to also look at social indicators, the impacts on investments in education, investments in welfare and what it tells us in terms of the resulting capacity and competence of individuals to make progress in dealing with the problems.
I am really talking about getting the best use of taxpayers' dollars at a time when we face real restraint and providing a much more effective way of enabling people to respond and make choices themselves and not have choices made for them.
Let me give one small example of how a saving can be made that has an impact both for the individual and for society at large. If we could get the 400,000 people who are almost permanently unemployed through the unemployment insurance ranks and who
receive benefits by changing that benefit to a form of employment benefit so they could get one more week of work, we would save the entire system $50 million, just by that one act alone, an additional week of work.
Think of what it does for the individual who knows that for the first time he or she has an opportunity to springboard back into the workforce as opposed to simply planning a life which is a constant round of getting from one benefit program to another. That is the key element in trying to shift the role of government and the way government operates.
This is not critical of what was done in the past. It was a product of its time. In the 1940s, 1950s and even the 1960s there was a view about how government should work in terms of providing a form of security through welfare payments and social benefits. During those times we were not facing the kind of economic transformation which is going on today. We were not facing the disruption which is now taking place.
People now have a much higher level of skills requirements. We have seen all the reports; I do not have to repeat them. The reports show that those who have some kind of post-secondary education have an 85 per cent to 90 per cent chance of getting a job. Those who have less than high school have about a 30 per cent chance of getting a job.
One cannot simply say it is the individual who has to survive and swim in that sea. I reject that philosophy. Government after all is nothing more than the combined collective representation of all those individuals recognizing there are certain things that have to be done together and not individually. We have to combine resources across the country so that when one area is facing higher unemployment, other areas help support it. That is the fundamental concept of sharing.
The more we fragment the country, the more we divide it, separate it and turn it into a series of fiefdoms, the less capable we are of helping individuals to respond when they have needs because we no longer have the benefit of that sharing. That is why the federal government must continue to play an important role in this area. Those who are the apostles of provincialism, which is to say turn everything over and make all the decisions, will recognize what can happen.
One example is a discussion we are having with the province of British Columbia. It is feeling the pressure from people who are moving in from other provinces. Those in B.C. forget that in the 1980s people from British Columbia were moving to other provinces which were picking up the responsibility. They forget that it was a very important time for there to be a balanced wheel to make sure there was a proper adjudication and sharing of resources.
That is why it is important to help redefine, select and work out how we in the new department of human resources can play that role clearly in a system of partnership. We must also make sure there is a very active and useful delivery of service to individual Canadians nationally.
In the last year in the department of human resources in its combined form, we provided in one way or another a transaction service to one million Canadians. We are the largest service delivery organization in the country. We deal with more Canadians than McDonald's, Air Canada and Sears, Roebuck combined. That is why the question of service becomes so important.
One of the most important elements of the reforms we are introducing is trying to understand how we can provide a much better service related to where the individual is and to get away from the top down command system. I used to say that the departments we brought together had a General Motors or IBM philosophy. I wanted to turn that into a Canadian Tire philosophy where it was based in the local communities with tools and instruments customized and tailored to the needs of those communities.
We are pioneering in this approach. We have made enormous progress in the past year by being able to fundamentally rethink and redo the way in which the department of human resources works. It is an attempt to find the most relevant kind of governmental organization to fit the job system and social system we are going to need as we approach the new century.
As an example, last August we announced a fundamental change in the way in which the service delivery operation of the department would operate. We are going from 450 points of service in the country to 700 points of service. We are providing a much broader network.
Some of my colleagues have been very concerned about how the federal government ensures adequate and effective services in rural areas. This means a much broader extension of the services of the department into areas that did not have services before. People can now access services without having to travel 50 miles or 70 miles to visit an old CEC.
I will give the example of a person in Elgin county where I visited about a month or so ago. In terms of testing out new models, one of our young officers in St. Thomas worked out a system where through the Internet he was able to provide the same access to information and services we used to provide by having somebody come into the St. Thomas office. In a period of three months with that simple change alone he was able to provide service to 4,000 new clients.
If we had had to do it the old way, people would have been in line ups five miles long every single day at that St. Thomas office trying to find information on pensions or employment. One of the
end results is that people can access the job bank in the local grocery stores, high schools, libraries, places where people go, where they carry out their normal business. We can work partnerships at those local levels so people get that same level of service.
We are also working with the disabled community to establish a new job bank for disabled Canadians which is tied in with a large number of corporations. Again the access is provided at the local level and is designed by the users themselves working with the business community. All of a sudden a number of disabled Canadians can put their resumes on the system. Businesses can recognize what those resumes are and they can do the transaction together. It frees up our own officers to do the really important and intense work of counselling and mentoring and providing good advice as to where one can go and how to get there.
One of the major advantages as well is that what used to be the old job centres are now becoming in a sense human resource centres where there is an integration of all the services of the department. Seniors, students and workers under the unemployment insurance system can all come to the same place.
As a result, seniors will have four times as many offices in which they can be serviced than previously. The new technology means that processing UI claims can be reduced to two days when it used to take sometimes 10 days to two weeks. Claims for old age security can be processed in half a day instead of eight days. That means a lot. We can put that in cold statistical terms but for a senior who has been waiting for an application for old age security, to have it within a half a day as opposed to eight or 10 days makes a big difference when they do not have a lot of money to deal with.
We are substantially broadening that network to a variety of points of service. We are using the new technology. We are not afraid of it, like some members are saying, like the Luddites of old who say that we cannot use new information systems. There is not a business, not an organization in the country which is not asking itself questions about how to improve efficiency, productivity and access by using the new systems. That is what we are now doing and implementing. It is a fundamental part of trying to provide better service for those nine million Canadians who use our services.
Not only are we integrating within the programs we offer, we are also undertaking a wide variety of experiments and projects throughout Canada in terms of a guichet unique. We are providing ways in which all three levels of government can work together to provide a common one stop shopping service.
For example, in Alberta there are a series of youth centres. Both the federal and provincial governments now combine to provide a very direct ability to deal with long term unemployed youth in three of those centres. In early evaluations and in talking to Alberta officials, we are finding a much higher success rate because we combined services and young people can come to one place and get that same kind of service.
Another interesting example is in the province of Quebec, in Alma, the hometown of the Leader of the Opposition. My department, the SQDM, the local municipalities and local clubs are now combined in a single service delivery system.
It is exceedingly strange that we are being attacked by those who say we are intruding but in fact we have a wide variety of those co-operative projects going on in the province of Quebec with the Government of Quebec. The reason we are doing that is because they work better that way. This is at the working level. It is not at the level of the top bureaucrats or politicians who love to talk about the grand design. It is at the working community level. We are dealing directly with the service in towns like Alma, Jonquière, and other places where there are these combined services.
The key to success is that people find it much more effective, much more helpful and much more productive for them as individuals. Is that not what it is about? Is that not what government is about? Those are the kinds of changes we are undertaking.
It also means we will go back and look at many of the old programs which were developed 20 or 30 years ago, some of which I helped to develop when I was a minister back in the early eighties, for example the national training act. We must ask if they work any more.
During this past year we have undertaken very extensive evaluations testing what does and does not work. We have produced a series of 24 different evaluation reports which are publicly available. They provide a very good assessment as to what kind of involvement or participation makes sense in the areas of benefits, youth, et cetera. Based upon those evaluations, which we have already highlighted, we are providing a substantial distillation of our programs from 39 or 40 programs down to five programs, five basic tools.
I will take a moment to articulate this most clearly. These five tools will provide the opportunity for decisions to be made at the local employment centre level instead of having to respond to some program designed and manufactured in Ottawa or the regional office. Decisions can be made right at the community level with the local partners, the provinces, municipalities, businesses and social agencies. They can tailor how those tools can be most effectively used to deal with the unemployment problem in a specific locale.
It is decentralization of a very different kind. There has been a lot of talk and we have read much in the paper about decentralization. So far it has been a somewhat restricted debate as it talks only
about decentralization in terms of transferring from the federal government to provincial governments.
Should we not also be talking about how to empower communities and individuals to make more choices? Is that not what we should be looking at in terms of decentralization? Should we not be looking at how governments become partners and facilitators in the local community context? Not only do we find a much more effective way to deal with the unemployment problem in a specific community, but we can also begin to help strengthen and enhance those communities themselves.
Social analysts have made a very good and profound contribution by recognizing that with all the pressures of the global economy and new technologies, one of the consequences has been the unravelling of what they call a civic society. Those intermediate organizations, trade unions, social agencies, community based organizations no longer have the same capacity to respond.
I will give a personal working example. When I was in school, just a few years ago-
