Madam Speaker, our Liberal colleague showed us the true objective of this bill. It is called the employment insurance bill, but as you have seen, there was an underlying concern to all her comments; the purpose of the new measures is to fight against abusers or pseudo-abusers.
The new Minister of Human Resources Development, when he first appeared before the committee, indicated that he wanted to ease the rules, but when he appeared the second time, told us about an extraordinary discovery he had made. He said there were approximately 120,000 cases of fraud in Canada. In fact, there are 116,603. He was asked if that was an increase. No, it represents a decrease because there were 131,081 cases of fraud in 1991-92.
I will be brief, Madam Speaker. Figures show that the last bill allowed the government to recover $272 million and they hope to recover an additional amount of $345 million with this new bill.
But, out of those $272 million, figures submitted by the parliamentary secretary himself show that only $93 million resulted from real fraud. Three quarters of the remaining $179 million were due to errors made by the unemployment insurance commission. These were errors.
So instead of passing legislation that is an insurance plan designed at fighting fraud, the government should have drafted legislation to prevent errors, which sometimes cause serious trouble, because the commission can go back five years.
Does the member agree that we should take more time and draft this bill in such a way that it will help public servants prevent errors, which most of the time are made in good faith simply because the legislation is not clear? Does she think we will improve the bill with last minute amendments? There were 42 in committee one evening. What does she think about correcting mistakes before we attack the pseudo-abusers, the pseudo-defrauders?