Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise today, not to say that this is a good bill but to give some support mainly to the three Bloc members. I am talking about the hon. members for Mercier, Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup and Lévis, who, for almost two years now, have been fighting long and hard on behalf not only of their constituents but also of all the people of Quebec and an important part of the people of Canada, for those who will fall victim to this unemployment insurance reform.
This is totally absurd. We are faced with a government that is not living up to its promises, as we have seen many times this week. Liberals had promised to scrap the GST, but they did not deliver. The Minister of Justice and the Prime Minister promised to vote as a party on the issue of sexual orientation as a prohibited ground of discrimination, but they did not keep their word.
On the one hand, they do not keep their promises and, on the other other, they do things they did not promise to do. Among other things, they are undertaking a reform of the unemployment insurance system even though, as mentioned by my colleague for Trois-Rivières, the Prime Minister, when in the opposition, fought against the unemployment insurance reform proposed by the Conservatives.
The Bloc Quebecois' fight goes back to the fall of 1994 when the Minister of Human Resources Development started a huge consultation process throughout the country on a reform proposal.
We could speak of reform then because we did not know yet what would come out of these consultations or what kind of a bill would finally be introduced in the House of Commons. So Canadians were consulted. Our three colleagues travelled across Canada with the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development. In the end, 80 per cent of the witnesses heard by the committee were against the reform proposal as it was then formulated. More eager to please the government than the people, the standing committee prepared a report, which, of course, was not in accordance with what the people consulted had said. That is why the Bloc Quebecois presented a dissenting report.
Since then, especially since the 1995 budget speech, we have seen a series of government measures aimed at pulling the government out of fields of activity where it had been present for many years. In many cases the Bloc Quebecois supported such measures, and I am thinking in particular of the privatization of airports and air traffic control. We agreed on the principle.
In the present case, the government is doing exactly the opposite. It has not contributed one cent to the unemployment insurance fund since 1991. So if there were one sector the government could privatize and where it could say to employers and employees: "Since you are the only contributing to it, we are asking you to manage the unemployment insurance program", it is this one.
Why is the government doing the opposite in other sectors, for example with navigation aids? The Coast Guard is trying to get users pay the bill. Why did the government not do the same with unemployment insurance? For a very simple reason, the government discovered, following the 1995 budget, in which there were important cuts to UI eligibility and benefit payment criteria, that
unemployment insurance has become an extremely productive cash cow. Therefore why privatize such a cost effective program?
It will even further reduce benefits so that claimants will receive lower payments, and make it more and more difficult to receive unemployment insurance by imposing stricter conditions. Furthermore, it will make sure that everybody pays into it, even those who do not have the slightest chance of receiving benefits one day.
Realizing this was an extremely important revenue source, the government would have us believe it is reforming the unemployment insurance program. But what is it truly doing? It is in fact draining the UI fund in order to reduce the deficit.
This bill will have extremely harmful results. Because it is afraid Canadians will discover more harmful features, the government decided to limit debate. A time limit was imposed on the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development so the government could steamroll passage of this bill.
The bill will have extremely negative consequences particularly because it is going after the people most in need, those who are most vulnerable. It is an attack against seasonal workers and part time workers, which necessarily means women because they represent a high percentage of that category. It is an attack against entrants and immigrants who have been here for a few years and who, for cultural or other reasons, obviously have more difficulty than others entering into the labour force.
The most vulnerable workers will be affected the most. They will be forced to contribute to unemployment insurance from their very first hour of work. This, in itself is not bad. We could even say it is a good measure had the government not already raised the eligibility criteria. These people are forced to contribute from their very first hour of work, but the eligibility notch is raised so high that we can be sure many contributing workers will never be eligible-some say one million of them.
Making part time workers, students and so on contribute will bring $900 million into the unemployment insurance fund, and what makes that measure so perverse is that it will allow the government to give that money to the richer workers. We must remember that maximum insurable earnings, which were set at $42,500, will be lowered to $39,000. That means that the government took $900 million in the pockets of the poorest workers in order to give it to the wealthiest, when it could have raised that maximum instead. It was at $42,000. Why not set it at $50,000 or $60,000? It chose not to. It preferred to take the money from the poorest workers, those most vulnerable. For that reason alone, this bill is a perverse and antisocial measure and, unfortunately, if it is passed, we will have to pay a social price for it in the years to come.