Madam Speaker, on March 30, I asked the Minister of Human Resources Development a question on the effectiveness of his Youth Strategy. Of course, since his answer was not satisfactory and contradicted his own department's assessment of his own program, I would like to get back to this matter. Allow me to reiterate my quotes, taken from page 2-41 of the Estimates for the Department of Human Resources Development.
The first one stated that program evaluations revealed no significant improvements in terms of job opportunities compared to what could have been anticipated without the Youth Strategy program. The second quote, a little further along, indicated that the Canada-New Brunswick Youth Strategy also increased participants' dependency on social assistance. Still further along, the Strategy is described as not obviously affecting dependency on social assistance in Newfoundland. Participants and non-participants alike were more dependent on social assistance after the program. Considerable money was spent.
For example, the Canada-New Brunswick agreement provides that $120 million will be spent. The Youth Strategy program in Newfoundland will spend $56.6 million. If I have the time, I would like to give you some statistics for Quebec to show that young people's dependency on social assistance increased not only in New Brunswick and Newfoundland. I will give some statistics for Quebec.
In 1991, Quebec had 116,000 welfare recipients under 30 years of age. In 1995, we now have 140,000 young people on welfare, of whom 74,000 are under 25, if we want to correlate this with the figures from Statistics Canada used by the Department of Human Resources Development. I find it hard to understand, and I hope the parliamentary secretary will be more persuasive than his minister, that although according to a document prepared by the department, an internal assessment of this program shows there has been an increase in the number of young people on welfare, the minister says it is the best program in the world. I find that hard to believe.
There is also the fact that last year, we had cuts in unemployment insurance totalling $2.5 billion. Bill C-17 increased the waiting period for unemployment insurance benefits, reduced the benefits themselves, and also reduced the benefit period. As a result, there has been a significant increase, in Quebec and other provinces as well, in the number of people who go from unemployment insurance to welfare. The most frequent casualties of this situation are young people, because they have 40 per cent of the insecure jobs in Canada and are the first to be unemployed, and thus the first casualties of cuts in unemployment insurance. Their only alternative is welfare. I wish the parliamentary secretary would be a little more forthcoming than his minister about the assessment of this program.