moved:
That this House require the Minister of Human Resources Development to withdraw Bill C-12, an act respecting employment insurance in Canada, from the Order Paper immediately and go back to the drawing board, since this reform hits young people, women, seasonal workers and immigrants hard.
Mr. Speaker, if this House had any sensitivity whatsoever to the situation of the unemployed, we would have been involved in discussion of this extremely important motion for three hours by now. The House has taken up three hours with discussions of something far removed from the motion we have tabled. This clearly shows a lack of sensitivity to those Canadians who will be bearing the brunt of the severe cutbacks to the unemployment insurance system. I believe it also demonstrates how tenuous a grasp the people involved have of the realities in their ridings and their regions, whether in Quebec or elsewhere.
The matter under discussion will have dramatic repercussions all across Canada. The Minister of Human Resources Development, backed up so kindly by the Minister of Finance, has decided unemployment insurance needed reforming. There had been feelings that yes, perhaps the plan did need some modernizing, perhaps to make sure the money invested in it was used in the workers' best interests. Perhaps the time might have come for the government to review the use of the billions of dollars in the unemployment
insurance fund, so as to get better use from it. We are open to looking at an unemployment insurance system aimed at returning people to the work force, helping workers retrain, adapting the labour force to market needs. Well, we are open to considering this. No one can be against progress.
However, when this government came to power, two years ago, right from the start, on the pretence that it was going to overhaul the system, it announced a major social program reform. It said that it was going to issue a document explaining to Canadians how social programs, including unemployment insurance, were going to be modified. The then minister kept on postponing the release of drafts and, eventually, began to hint at an unemployment insurance reform that was going to hurt.
I remember how my colleague, the member for Mercier, would rise in this House and ask the then minister: "Is it true that the government is getting ready to cut the unemployment insurance system in such and such a way? Is it true that the government is getting ready to hit young people with its reform?" The only answer we ever got from the minister was that the member was ill informed. He never let on to what was being planned. The documents coming from his office were working papers, mere scraps of paper on which suggestions had been haphazardly scribbled for the minister's attention, recommending cuts here or there; but the minister claimed they were without foundation.
We were kept waiting. We were patient. We asked questions. We warned the government. Finally, a bill was introduced, then withdrawn and reintroduced, unchanged; its main objective is essentially to make cuts. Indeed, after cuts of $2.4 billion overall in the unemployment insurance system in 1994, current numbers show that within two years an additional $1.5 billion dollars will be cut from the program.
Granted, these days, we must expect cuts, and some reduction in benefits. But what really shocked us when we scrutinized the numbers was to find out-people might not believe this-that the federal government has not paid one penny into the unemployment insurance fund since 1990. Is it acceptable for a government which has not been paying one penny into the unemployment insurance fund to use employers' and employees' contributions to finance its deficit?
Yet, this is precisely what the federal government is doing. It is unacceptable that a government, a Minister of Finance-the figures are now known because the budget has been tabled-dare write in their budget papers: "Surplus of Unemployment Insurance Fund 1994-95, $4.1 billion; 1995-96, $5 billion; 1996-97, $5 billion; 1997-98, $5.3 billion". And the figures are not yet available for subsequent years.
What makes people mad in rural Quebec, or rural Canada for that matter, is that they must get 10, 12 or 15 weeks of employment per year if they work in a seasonal sector. Is it not appalling to realize that you might lose your unemployment insurance benefits because the Minister of Finance decided, right in the middle of an employment crisis, that he would take $5 billion out of the fund to help reduce the deficit?