Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to enter into the debate on the bill today and on the motion before us.
I will begin by talking briefly about the problems we will have if we send the bill to committee prior to second reading. It is a problem for me because I was a member of the committee when Bill C-43, the Lobbyists Registration Act, was first tried in Parliament. At first I eagerly accepted it. I said it would be a really good thing because then we as ordinary members, backbenchers, would have input into the bill at the very beginning. Hopefully we would be able to craft the bill so it would include from the beginning the necessary changes that would produce widespread approval among all the parties.
However, I was greatly disappointed. During the time of the committee everything went really well. We had a good chairperson and it was a time when we built good collegiality among ourselves. There were many times when we discussed these things. We came to a consensus but I was very disappointed when finally we came to the end of the process. Even though we thought we had agreement on a number of issues we raised on behalf of Canadians we represent, the members of the committee on the day of the voting of the clause by clause came in with their little check sheets and voted according to a pre-plan, which greatly disappointed me.
I was really distressed. A number of the things they voted against were things that I thought we had reached consensus on. In the end, it simply did not materialize that the individual members were able to express their convictions.
I would like to be on record as being opposed to this process. I know it was supposed to be new and innovative but my experience is that not only does it not work at that level, but it cuts off the next level of amendment possibilities and further debate which is very important in the House; to go through the regular procedure of having first reading, second reading, committee and then third reading.
I am against that part and urge all fellow members to preserve the functioning of Parliament by rejecting this motion to send it to committee at this time. It ought to go through second reading in a normal sense first.
I would like to now speak about the whole question of unemployment. Unemployment is a very severe problem. In the downturn of an economy many businesses respond of necessity by laying off some employees. Those employees now have lost their jobs and because generally the downturn in the economy produces fewer opportunities in other businesses, as more and more people get laid off the probability and the availability of getting other jobs is reduced.
Obviously something has to be done. The present plan and the plan by the Minister of Human Resources Development are not long term solutions to this problem.
The types of policies the government is embarking on further erode the employability of Canadians. The real task before us is to provide a climate in which there are jobs available, in which there are employment opportunities and in which it is possible for people of all skills levels to find their niche and to contribute to society economically and in other ways. Tinkering with the bill will not do anything to achieve that fuller goal.
With respect to meeting the needs of those temporarily unemployed, Canadians should begin to recognize they are getting a very short shrift from government, from the unemployment insurance commission and from the whole system which is designed to tide them over through a difficult period. Many people would much rather have a job than rely on the limited benefits of unemployment insurance.
I will go even further. I reiterate what I have said many times at public meetings and in private. A number of employers have spoken to me since the time I became involved in the political process. They find it very difficult to obtain and keep workers because they are competing with unemployment insurance. They are competing with a situation in which an individual says: "I get this much if I do not work. Why should I work for you?"
I was at one time the recipient of this policy. I owned a small business with a partner. We hired someone who worked for us for a short time and then abruptly quit. When I asked him about it he listed the salary and benefits he received from us and said: "It costs me only about $200 less per month to not do anything, so I am out of here". Unfortunately the business we were in required us to have accessibility to our employees at very odd hours. It was not a very pleasant working situation. We did not have the financial flexibility to pay huge bucks to persuade people to stay. We went through a continuing line of people who worked for us basically long enough to qualify for unemployment insurance and then they were gone.
One thing which really annoyed me was that those employees, all of whom were male, as it was heavy industrial work, when they filed their income tax returns, in every case they were able to receive a refund on their overpayment to UI. They were unemployed and under the limit, so they overpaid. However, we as employers struggling to keep the business going ended up paying the maximum to the UIC and to the Canada pension plan and we were ineligible for rebates comparable to the overpayments the employees were making. That was a great unfairness.
Unemployment insurance is exactly what its name implies. It ensures we will have unemployment. The name is now being changed. It is a cosmetic change. All the principles remain essentially the same. There are a few cosmetic changes being proposed, none of which will produce any profound changes in how the system operates and the disincentives built in to take part time work.
A number of years ago I worked at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and once again our UI premiums increased. It was at the time when they crossed the $100 per month threshold. I talked to my fellow instructors. We did some calculating. There were approximately 750 instructors at the institute. We were paying $100 per month each, which means a monthly contribution of $75,000. Our employer, paying 40 per cent more, contributed an additional $105,000 per month, making a total of $180,000 per month, sent to Ottawa for the UIC from our little group of instructors. That makes a total of $2.16 million per year.
Instead of being involved in that coercive system, we would have been able to keep the money and invest it or use it. We would have been able to provide the equivalent of 54 jobs based on a salary of $40,000 per year. Meanwhile, our fellow instructors were being laid off because of pressure of taxation and other things. We were forced to pay people to leave work when we would much rather have shared the workload with them. Fifty-four of those people were being subsidized.