Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to take part in the debate in the House of Commons on the motion, particularly since the hon. member for Mercier could be nominated for the Quebec prize for literature, the Prix Athanase-David. Her speech is a great example of fiction writing, and I trust that all of her colleagues in this House will support her nomination after hearing it. This is an excellent example of the Bloc's talent for writing complete and utter fantasy.
When we read the Bloc motion, we wonder where its members have been. Like Rip Van Winkle, they have been asleep for the last while. They neither take into account the statement made by the Prime Minister, which says very clearly that we will be prepared and in fact will welcome the opportunity to give full responsibility for education and training to the provinces.
The tabling last Friday of the legislation for employment insurance clearly indicates once again that the area of education and training is the jurisdiction of the provinces. Furthermore, we would go beyond that and take in those areas of direct employment activity that are within our constitutional orbit and share with the provinces, sit down and work in concert with the provinces, plan with the provinces, co-operate with the provinces for one reason: to develop a partnership for employment.
Yet the Bloc members bring in a motion that totally and completely misses the point. They are saying that somehow there will be more intrusion, more activity, and no withdrawal. It seems to me that this group simply cannot take yes for an answer. When we say we are going to do exactly what is being proposed, they seem oblivious, unable to filter it out. That only confirms my suspicion that all the speeches, all the motions, and all the commentaries were written before we even got around to making good on the initiative of the Prime Minister or tabling legislation. They just pulled it out of the old vault, took out the old speeches from the old drawers, put a new date on it, and presented it once again without taking a look at reality or the facts or the hopeful signs.
With the initiative we announced on Friday I believe we can begin developing a whole new set of relationships with provinces, communities, and individuals directed toward the creation of jobs and employment in this country. It is the beginning of a new dialogue about how we can come together and form arrangements so we can share responsibility. If people are unemployed they do not care whether it is a provincial or a federal jurisdiction, they simply want a job. That is what it is all about.
As I listened to the hon. member for Mercier carefully, what was beginning to creep into the language was that she was far more concerned about transferring power to bureaucrats in provincial capitals than putting money directly into the hands of individuals so they can get back to work. That is the real issue. It is power that is at the heart of this motion, not employment. It is the opportunity to control and manage, not to provide a new form of empowerment for individuals. That is what the debate is really about. It is really oldspeak government. It is really setting the clock back.
When Canadians, in whatever region, are looking for government to provide new leadership, new formulas, new methods, we have an opposition party that is retreating back into the romantic past, trying once again to dig up the old speeches that were written 30 or 40 years ago and not dealing with the difficult new realities in a world where work has changed.
The major modernization of the insurance system of Canada for employment is pegged on one important reality: the world of work is changing and we must keep up and be relevant to that world of work. That is why the measures we have introduced state that the clear responsibility that was given by the provinces to the federal government in 1941 to be responsible for the basic insurance program for Canadians dealing with unemployment had to be modernized. I will be the first to say that throughout the years it has been a good program. It has provided an enormous bridge of support for generation after generation of Canadians who have faced unemployment.
We should take some real pride in the fact that the federal government has been able to ensure not only security for the individual but security for the regions. Areas where there was wealth, growth, and jobs were able to share with those who were less advantaged. That has been the genius of the program. It was built on sharing, something our hon. friends opposite forget about. Sharing is not part of their vocabulary. Co-operation is not part of their vocabulary, the notion that somehow they can have a national system of insurance that enables Canadians to distribute support and security because we all mutually benefit from it. It is not a matter of charity but of good investment. We must make sure we can support the various measures in areas where they are faced with high unemployment so that those areas with lower unemployment do not have to bear the full burden in a geographic way.
This plan has worked for most of its years, but it is changing because Canada is changing. What we have been discovering in the last decade or so is that the original architecture was no longer sufficient to meet a world where the work has changed, a world where we now have hundreds of thousands of part time workers, where there are multiple job owners who were not being given any protection, where individuals were facing much tougher problems of adjustment when jobs or skills changed.
There is one thing that is clear from every single analysis and study that has been done internationally and nationally: the higher the level of literacy, skill and education, the better the chance for a job. There are lots of anecdotes and examples of people with good degrees who cannot find work. That is one reason we have introduced the youth internship program, which enables young people to move from school to work in an easier fashion through industry support and small business.
We know we have to invest in those areas. We also know that increasingly people need to get re-employment much quicker and faster than they do now and that there are useful tested means of achieving that.
We spent the last two years working on various projects using wage supplements where the small business community that wants to hire a new worker but does not have quite the cash flow or is concerned it will not get full productivity or full learning in the first six or eight months is reluctant to make that commitment. Wage supplements open the door. We have seen in place after place that we have 70 per cent to 80 per cent improvement in job retention as a result of that measure and that we can extend work by 14 or 15 weeks. This is what is important, that we add about $4,000 to $5,000 additional income.
In talking about the employment insurance program, people get tied down talking about their benefits. What we have to talk about is their income. How do we improve people's income? The best way to improve income is by employment. That is the best way of doing it. If people simply rely year after year on a benefit program they begin to lose the ability to be in the job market and also their income does not grow. Governments are having tight times. Provincial governments everywhere are cutting back on those assistance programs. The real thing is to have a springboard back into the job market.
We have said we are going to take all the programs we have, 39 programs, and bring them down to five simple employment measures. These are not programs with their own organizations and their own bureaucracies, but a basic set of measures that are available to individuals to get back to work. They make the choice.
I find it amazing that the members of the opposition do not have much trust in individual choice, that they really do not believe that individuals can exercise the right to decide how to get back to work and how to make these tools work. They really have lost faith in the right of individuals to be able to choose and decide, not exclusively but with some support. We know that oftentimes individuals thrown totally into the market by themselves do need some assistance, but assistance that works.
However, the opposition members talk about transferring from one government to another and all these kinds of things. They have lost the sense that individuals are what really count and that they should be given the opportunities to make those choices. At the same time, they have also lost something else that is very important to recognize. It goes back to the fundamental importance of the employment insurance system: it is a federal constitutional responsibility and people pay in premiums.
The hon. member from the Bloc Quebecois shakes his head. This is a party that spends its entire question period and its entire existence in the House arguing about federalism in the Constitution. Yet this hon. gentleman does not know that in 1941 the provinces ceded responsibility for unemployment insurance to the federal government. That is incredible ignorance for someone who likes to say he knows what he is talking about. He does not know a simple reality of the history of this country.
When people pay a premium they have a right to a benefit. That is what they are investing in, the right to that benefit. Now the Bloc Quebecois is saying no, just turn the money over to a bunch of bureaucrats and they will decide whether they get the benefit for not; it is no longer his or her right as an individual to have that benefit. That is what the Bloc members are saying in this motion, that individuals in Quebec who pay a premium no longer will be assured of the right to get the benefit of that because it is going to be decided somewhere else. As a result, the fundamental principle of the insurance program is taken away.
I do not think that is a very popular notion in Quebec or anywhere else. What is recognized is that they are fundamentally undermining the philosophy of the insurance program, which is that people contribute to protect themselves against the risk of unemployment. That is what it is all about.
I am surprised at the lack of understanding of the hon. member about the history of federalism in the country wherein that was ceded by the provinces to give us the insurance program. I am even more concerned about the sense of neglect of the principle of insurance, that is that people pay for the protection.
Basically we are saying that they will be eligible for an income benefit and an employment benefit. The employment benefit has within it five basic measures: a wage supplement, with highly effective evaluations in terms of getting people back to work.
Income supplements tested out in New Brunswick and British Columbia over the past year show that people on lower incomes who would not take jobs because the income was not sufficient to pay for their family needs will take the jobs if there is a small top up. Thirty-three per cent are now back to work today compared to only 3 per cent in the general area of proven success.
Turning to self-employment, Canada is the self-employment capital of the world. We are generating more opportunities for individuals to start their own businesses. In a matter of two years of testing the program for unemployment insurance, over 30,000 people started their own businesses. Each created a job for another person. In other words 60,000 jobs were created as a result of the measure.
Hon. members of the opposition want to deny people that. They say: "Don't do that. Don't give people the right to self-employment, to start their own businesses, to create jobs for themselves or somebody else".