Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to a matter I have raised in the past about employment insurance eligibility.
Employment insurance is in a crisis. At the moment, fewer than 40% of unemployed Canadians are receiving benefits and yet the surplus in the employment insurance fund is over $15 million.
On March 10, I asked the Minister of Human Resources Development when the situation would be critical enough to cause him to act. When the percentage of those eligible for EI benefits is down to 25% or 15%? What would it take to get this government to revise its eligibility criteria for employment insurance?
The minister said he was concerned about the situation but did not understand why the proportion of unemployed people who qualified for benefits was so low. Is the government blind or simply stupid? It changes the EI eligibility criteria to make it harder to get benefits and then wonders why people do not qualify. After a year the government is wondering why people do not qualify.
I would like to repeat the minister's response. He said this:
Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Acadie—Bathurst would do well to start learning about his own region. The employment insurance participation rate in the Atlantic region is 75%. The participation rate in the province of New Brunswick is over 80%.
I can guarantee you that I am familiar with my region. My hon. colleague across the floor, the Minister of Human Resources Development, is not.
That is why I invited the Minister of Human Resources Development to come to Acadia. The local newspapers back home supported this, and even ran political cartoons showing the Minister of Human Resources hitchhiking his way to Acadia.
If he did get down to our area and saw the poverty in which people are living, he would not be long in noticing that his 80% figure does not exist. Absolutely not. What is more, the New Brunswick minister of human resources development, a Liberal, has called the employment insurance changes terrible, and has said that fewer people would be eligible for EI, so more would end up on welfare.
Those are the words of a Liberal, the New Brunswick minister of human resources development, and a Liberal like those members on the other side.
Last week, moreover, another Liberal, minister of intergovernmental and aboriginal affairs and acting minister of education, Bernard Thériault, said that the crisis in Acadia was the fault of the employment insurance changes. How can the minister and the government not have any social conscience toward the people of Canada?
Ours is not the only area affected. Look at Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the Gaspé, and parts of northern Ontario. Or northern Manitoba, northern Saskatchewan. I am just back from B.C., and they had the same problem there too.
I am calling upon the government, once and for all, to examine its conscience and do the right thing for Canadians, do what Canadians want to see done. That $15 billion in the bank should go back to the people it belongs to, in other words back into the pockets of the workers.