Mr. Speaker, I am happy to share my time with the member for Saskatoon-Clark's Crossing, to give as many people as possible the opportunity to participate in this important debate.
This debate is on the reform of the unemployment insurance program, a reform that has been anticipated for some time by Canadians. What Canadians want from an employment insurance program is some certainty that the program will provide help for those people who are unemployed through a time of crisis in their lives for a short period of time until an adjustment can be made to find a new job and make those adjustments.
Unfortunately, that is not what we have in this program. We do not have equality. We have different terms for different parts of the country. There are something like 62 different regions that all have different criteria. Some people are upset about that. They are upset that the same terms and conditions do not extend from one side of the country to the other. They are also concerned about the
dependency. I will talk about that in a moment. I believe they are concerned about trying to reform the unemployment insurance plan into a plan that conforms more to a true insurance plan in the future.
I want to speak about the regional inequities in this bill. Everyone wants fairness. I believe it was the member from Kenora who responded earlier when a Bloc member suggested that the people of Quebec were not being treated fairly in this legislation. It was astounding to hear the member from Kenora say: "We are being fair. We are giving $1.33 back for every $1 contributed by people in Quebec". That says a lot right there.
A dollar for a dollar. It seems that all parts of the country should be treated equally and the same standards should apply to all.
One part of the country is doing quite well, a lot of new jobs are being created. In the last six years 87 per cent of all new jobs created in Canada were created in Alberta and B.C. At the same time, through this bill we are trying to encourage people to stay at home in parts of the country where there is a net job loss and a low possibility of any jobs in the future. That flies directly in the face of common sense.
My grandparents and my mother lived about 40 miles south of here around 1912. They moved to Alberta, to new opportunity, to new farmland that was available. People have been mobile in this country for many years. It seems that is part of our Canadian society. We move to where the new jobs are. People generally do not want to collect unemployment insurance. They want opportunities.
In the Canada Employment Centre in my riding there was a time when we experienced about 4 per cent unemployment. As my colleague from Medicine Hat explained, this means no unemployment. It is only indicated because of the way we built this institutional reform into our unemployment insurance in 1971 when the Government of Canada became involved.
Last year, at a time when there was essentially no unemployment in my riding of Peace River, I met with a number of contractors. They said that they were having trouble getting trades people, yet the unemployment centre will not advertise Canada wide. We had a lucrative situation.
There were plumbers, for example, in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland who wanted jobs. They did not want to collect unemployment insurance, but there were no jobs available in their provinces. They were not even made aware of the opportunities in other parts of the country. The Canada Employment Centre was advertising in Edmonton and Calgary for the Grand Prairie area. Both areas were running quite well; there were no unemployed people. Therefore, they could not get experienced trades people. It was an intolerable situation.
Alberta and British Columbia are experiencing strong growth with many jobs being created. Out of the 443,000 jobs that have been created in Canada in the last six years, 345,000 have been created in Alberta and B.C. The largest four provinces in Canada have created 101 per cent of Canada's jobs which means that the rest of Canada has been losing jobs. We know where those areas are. Yet the reforms proposed by the government still encourage people to stay at home in those areas of net job loss to collect unemployment insurance. It is shameful.
The country has been broken into 62 regions. In Nova Scotia there are five regions with different unemployment criteria. That is simply not acceptable. We need national standards that are agreed to by all provinces.
I will take a moment to talk about dependency. That is an unfortunate part of the unemployment insurance program, especially since 1971. That is when the federal government intervened. It used a regional fairness scheme to try to engage in social engineering.
We are sending the wrong signals to Canadians. We are sending the signal that dependency is okay. We now have up to second and third generation families that have just graduated into this cycle of collecting unemployment insurance. Yet at the same time, parts of the country are crying out for workers.
What incentives are being offered which create this dependency? Twelve weeks to qualify in much of Atlantic Canada and in Quebec. It is 18 weeks in the rest of the country. Is that fair? Should a worker who is unemployed in my riding be treated differently from somebody who is unemployed in Newfoundland or Quebec? They should not. This creates that same dependency. People will stay at home and collect unemployment insurance.
This is not a true insurance plan. We need a plan which is administered by employees and employers. They would soon sort out the people who are ripping off the system. Their premiums are being used to finance people who are abusing the system.
Abuse is a very common factor in unemployment insurance. Payroll taxes reflect this. Employers and employees have had to pay higher amounts in the past several years which has resulted in a slush fund that the government will be using to buffer the deficit. Employees and employers are being asked to help pay down the deficit. That is unfair.
Payroll taxes in Canada are very high. Up until about 1971 you could take the unemployment figures from the United States and Canada, plot them on a graph over many decades and see that they were almost identical. In the bad times and in the good times the chart would show that unemployment figures in the United States and Canada were almost identical.
What happened in 1971 when the federal government intervened and became involved in the unemployment insurance fund? There has been a consistent spread of about 4 points in the last 25 years between Canada and the United States. Unemployment in Canada is always higher. That is the result of the institutional unemployment which has become part of the system because of these generous benefits.
We need national standards. We need a plan which is run by employees and employers. It could be done on a provincial basis which would enable it to be responsive to local needs.
The other part of the bill which really bothers me is that over two million part time workers will have to pay unemployment insurance premiums. These people have a tough time making ends meet to begin with. Often they are working at minimum wage. Now we are asking them to pay an unemployment insurance levy as well. I believe that will have the opposite effect. It will put many people in the position where they will say: "Why should I work? I may as well sit home and collect unemployment insurance".
We are moving in the wrong direction. What the people of Canada want is real reform of the unemployment insurance system, not something which is regionally based, not something which is unfair. They want all Canadians to be treated equally. They want to stop the abuse of the unemployment insurance system. They want to be generous enough to say to those people who are unemployed: "Yes, we are going to look after you through that time of your life when you are unfortunate enough to be unemployed".
Canadians are generous. That is why we pay our unemployment insurance premiums. We do not pay our unemployment insurance premiums so that individuals can live off the system from one year to the next. It becomes an abuse program which does not do much for our self-worth. I believe that most people need to work and to feel they are contributing to society.
We are not stopping the cycle of dependency which was started over 25 years ago. We are sending the wrong message to Canadians. I am opposed to Bill C-12. I will be voting against it. If we ever have the opportunity, we will make this a true insurance program. I look forward to that opportunity.