Madam Speaker, the amendments discussed today are on the mandate that will be given to the Canada Employment and Immigration Commission.
We find in this mandate the whole spirit of the act. This is why we wish that it be modified. I will read you briefly a few lines that express very clearly how the government wants things to be done. It says:
3 (1) The Commission shall monitor and assess how individuals, communities and the economy are adjusting to the changes made by this Act-
They take people for some kind of guinea pigs. "We will see how you will live with that, but, as a government, we will not take on any obligation. We do not assume any responsability". It is the whole spirit of the act that it expressed in the mandate given to the commission. "Give us your money, we will take care of it. The system is financed only by you, the employers and the employees, but it does not matter, we will put all the obligations on your side, and we, as a government, will make no commitment". It would have been a nice place to find a commitment by the government to say if the measures really have an effect on employment.
Will the unemployment insurance reform, in one, two, three years, have the impact expected by the government and help people find a job more easily? There is no obligation of this type in this clause. All that will be done will be to check how people have adjusted. It is truly the bureaucratic approach. Punitive action will be taken, the commission will see how people react to this action and, one year from now, the government will be in a position to say that there are more abusers than before because the act will have been made more complicated so as to produce more abusers.
This is an absurd way of thinking, because the unemployment insurance fund is fully financed by employers and employees. They are the ones who should have their say in the reform. There should be something about employment in the bill. Since the commission is asked to report to the minister, to produce an annual report of its assessment and the additional reports that the minister may request, do you not think that it would have been normal to say somewhere in the bill that the government will adopt unemployment reduction objectives, labour utilization objectives, that it will try to give people more jobs and that the commission will have to report on the effectiveness of the measures taken to meet those objectives?
No, according to the bill, the reports will deal with the success of the follow-up on people. It says, for example: "How the benefits and other assistance are utilized by employees and employers, their effect on the obligations of claimants to be available for and to seek employment".
The whole bill is based on the principle that people are abusers. In our society, it has been proved by statistics that only 4 per cent of the three million people having claimed UI benefits were abusers. Let us look at any other legislation, the Income Tax Act, for instance, to see if there is no more than 4 per cent of dodging. Is it normal to pass a bill imposing on all workers, in a deliberate and exaggerated way, rules that are specifically intended to deal with 4 per cent of Canadians? The government could have drafted a bill which looked at things differently.
The first thing it could have done is state that the commission is allowed to let employers, employees and all those concerned have their say. When the bill states that "The commission shall monitor and assess how individuals, communities and the economy are adjusting to the changes made", why is the burden of proof not reversed to let people come to testify and share their experience?
Nowadays, when we hear accounts like the one we heard at the demonstration in Rivière-du-Loup, where a young woman told us that her brother and her spouse committed suicide because of a lack of jobs and of the insecurity created by the UI reform, I think there are questions we must ask ourselves. We are not here simply to manage millions and billions of dollars. We are also here to create systems which will make people as happy as they can be and give them the opportunity to earn a decent salary to support their families. This should be part of the objectives of any government. We are not only accountants. We are people who have to make sure that laws promote development for everyone.
I would like to draw the attention of the House to a new element the government is trying to slip through with this bill. It has decided that those who would refuse training programs would no longer have the right to appeal. Let us take the example of young people who have studied and graduated, then landed a first job, but now find themselves in an impossible situation. There are no jobs in their field. They must decide if they will accept another training program and find out if there will be programs offered in their region, if they will have to move and what exactly they will be offered. If they refuse, they are automatically penalized and cannot appeal against that decision.
We know that, in legislation as complex as this bill, many decisions are interpreted differently depending on the official, not because government officials are not skilled, not because they do not know their subject well enough, but simply because provisions can be interpreted in different ways. The 45 or 50-year old employee who just lost his job because of technological changes and who is offered training in an area he knows nothing about is told by the official that the training will help him find a new job.
A worker aged 45, 50 or 55 who has just lost his job and needs unemployment insurance, may not need specialized training but rather some training to face the labour market, to find out what is coming and what kind of choices he will have to make. If we tell him: "Well, you always worked in construction, but the area where we expect employment in the future is tourism, you must go and take a 52-week course in tourism", this person, who never worked in that sector and thinks he might not have what it takes and would rather think about it a little longer and find out whether there are other programs or other things which would interest him more, is going to face a situation where he will not be at liberty to refuse.
It is more and more the state that is going to move people about, like pawns on a chess board, to get them to take a training course. If we, in our riding offices, are not aware that a fifteenth person is needed to complete a group so the course can be given, could the counsellor, at that time, be faced with a situation where he must steer someone in that direction, to fill the fifteenth slot, even though that training course might not really meet his needs according to his abilities, simply to be able to go ahead with the course, so that the 14 others to can receive their training?
According to the legislation, that person will have no other choice because if he refuses, he will be penalized and will not have the right to appeal. Others will come knocking on our doors because of a legislation that will not have corrected this kind of situation.
In clause 3, when it says that
The Commission shall monitor and assess how individuals, communities and the economy are adjusting to the changes made by this Act to the insurance and employment assistance programs-
it means the commission will have many things to monitor. There are many human factors, many variables in this bill. There will be significant secondary effects and numerous unforeseeable consequences.
Let us take just one example: the change from a system based on the number of weeks to one based on the number of hours. Will this change be good? Will it really make it possible for more people to qualify, as the government claims? Are there not secondary effects-for instance, the 910-hour requirement for new entrants, the increased number of hours compared to the old system-that will systematically force people onto welfare?
Will there not be increased pressure on transfer payments? Will this not gradually lead to an absurd situation, in which the UI fund runs a surplus while reducing training for claimants and providing fewer services to those who need them?
The mandate given the commission in clause 3 will not help us reach our goal. To do so, we must find a way for the commission to report directly to Parliament so we can get to the bottom of this.
One only has to remember the myriad studies-there is talk of 26 studies-that were done on the employability of seasonal workers. It was like pulling teeth. The government put on the table the studies it was interested in, but several of them were never released.
In conclusion, it will be very important to make sure the commission has a clear mandate that does not simply reflect the financial consequences of the reform, but really assesses its impact on employment. That is why we are urging the government to approve our amendment.