Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with a colleague.
The hon. member for Madawaska—Restigouche would like the government to make the small weeks pilot projects a permanent feature of the employment insurance system.
Like some of my colleagues on this side of the House, I greatly appreciate this salutary debate on the employment insurance system, but I must stress that these projects are, as their name shows, pilot projects. They were established in March 1997 to test other means of calculating EI benefits for a period ending November 15 of this year.
When it set up the employment insurance system in 1996, undertaking the first major reform of the unemployment insurance program in 25 years, the government knew full well that it was facing a very complicated situation.
Adjustment pilot projects were launched precisely to determine how to solve the problems faced by workers earning less than $150 a week. These adjustment projects were implemented in 29 Canadian regions where the unemployment rate consistently exceeded 10%.
These measures were taken because some thought that the new legislation was dissuading people from taking part time jobs. Some workers thought a week without income was better than a week with a small income that would reduce their EI benefits.
Since the government's general objective is to put unemployed Canadians back to work, pilot projects were created to examine possible solutions to this problem. Two methods of calculating benefits were tested. The first one was to bundle small weeks and the second one, to exclude them.
They were two different ways of solving the problem of reduced work weeks in high unemployment regions. But both methods had the same positive results for employment insurance recipients. It was a matter of methodology, as one can except with pilot projects.
The Government of Canada wanted to see which calculation method would work best and to determine the impact of pilot projects in general. It is important to remember this. The purpose of the pilot projects was to find solutions and to determine what would work best.
What were the results of these pilot projects? Since their implementation in May and August of 1997, 130,000 benefit periods have been established for small work weeks. Almost 12% of benefit claims submitted in participating regions involved small weeks.
What is important is that the people participating in the projects received benefits averaging $19 or about 10% more per week. I must specify that this group of recipients included more women—about 61%—than men.
Also, since these projects were implemented in high unemployment regions, more than 51% of applications came from Quebec and 35% from the Atlantic provinces. Overall, these preliminary results are encouraging.
However, these are preliminary—and I insist on this word—preliminary results, and the analysis has not been completed. After all, that is what pilot projects are for: to provide information that will serve as a basis for the development of long term policies.
Whether the hon. member likes it or not, policies cannot, and should not, be developed without due consideration. The government must thoroughly review the results before taking action. To do otherwise would be to act hastily.
We in this House of the Parliament of Canada know how essential the employment insurance system is to the social fabric of this country. That is why small weeks projects must be put in the appropriate context. In establishing a new employment insurance system, the Government of Canada wanted to introduce an hour based system.
In particular, it wanted to encourage Canadians to accept the work that was available. To all appearances, that is exactly what the new employment insurance program has enabled it to do. As the pilot programs have shown, the government is fully prepared to listen and to act.
As I have said, this reform is the broadest in a quarter of a century. That is why the government is prepared to examine the effects of the reform, and to make the necessary changes.
During this debate, much reference has been made to the beneficiaries to unemployed ratio. I must start off by pointing out that the beneficiaries to unemployed ratio was never established to measure the proportion of unemployed workers receiving employment insurance, and also more importantly that the it does not have a great deal to say about how effective the employment insurance program is at attaining its objectives. Why? Because the program is not intended to pay benefits to unemployed persons with tenuous or non-existent links to the labour market, or those who have left their jobs without justification.
The employment insurance program applies to 78% of Canadians with links to the labour market who have lost their jobs or resigned for valid reasons.
And although we have made great strides in the area of employment insurance, we should recognize that the plan cannot meet the needs of all unemployed Canadians. Everyone must realize that employment insurance is only part of the solution.
Other government measures are required and are in the process of implementation: measures to help people with disabilities, including a $30 million employability assistance fund over three years to help them find work; the aboriginal human resources development strategy, spread over five years and supported by a board headed by the private sector aimed at improving native people's access to employment; the youth employment strategy to help young people, including those at risk, to make a successful transition from school to work.
Finally, we set up the Canadian opportunities strategy to ensure that all Canadians have greater access to education and to the skills that will enable them to find and keep a better job. Nevertheless, the government does not have all the answers.
The concerns of the unemployed must become the concerns of all of us in the federal and provincial governments and in the private sector.
We must work together to find solutions. We must also not lose sight of the problems the employment insurance program was established to attack. It is not enough to make the plan more flexible in order to resolve the problems. That is not a solution.
As I said earlier, the situation is complex and will not be resolved with simple solutions. That having been said, we must continue to assess how Canadians and our economy are adjusting to the new EI regime.
Fortunately, the economic picture is improving in Canada. We are achieving some success in our efforts to lower the country's unemployment rate. In September, the unemployment rate was 8.3%, the lowest it has been in eight years.
We have also seen a 10.3% increase in the number of young people with jobs since the beginning of the year. The number of jobs has increased by a total of 1.3 million since October 1993.
Clearly, we are making headway. Together, we can attain our common goal of helping Canadians rejoin the workforce. As the statistics so clearly show, that is exactly what we are in the process of doing.