Mr. Speaker, I have a few comments as well as a question or two for my colleague. I am intrigued with this idea of the surplus. They keep saying that we have to have this surplus.
If we have a surplus it means that the money will be accumulating somewhere. The fact of the matter is that it is simply going into the general revenues of the government. That is a fact. We have it right from its documents.
I am very curious about the fact that the employers and employees are paying this money. If it really were a surplus, if there really were a separate fund and even if they use it to reduce the indebtedness, should they, to be honest and fair to the employers and employees, use it as a loan from them to pay off other debts and attribute the interest?
I am not terribly good at math. I just did it for 31 years. That is all. If we have an accumulated surplus of $15 billion and we assume a nominal rate of 6%, it would provide $900 million in surplus, almost a billion dollars a year in interest alone. This is money that has been taken from employers and employees and applied toward the debt. There is no accountability. There is no answering for it at all.
I would like my colleague to comment on that. I would also like him to comment a bit on something that is Reform Party policy. We would like to rationalize employment insurance funds and personalize them. Again I have done a few calculations. If we take the maximum members are paying, employers and employees together, it comes to $210 a month over the year.
I ask my colleague to take these numbers at face value and we can do the arithmetic together later. That money accumulates. If it were put into an individual fund it would give an incentive to an unemployed person to top up his or her income with as much part time employment as possible, whereas with the present scheme they get nothing. It would also permit the person to look very hard for a job because he would be using his own money instead of somebody else's money when he is unemployed. In the event that he is able to go through life without being unemployed, it could add to his retirement income.
At a nominal 6% if he were to pay for 10 years before asking for a benefit it could give him a benefit of $685 a week for a whole year, way more than we get under the present insurance plan. But the money would be his besides. If he were to use it for retirement it could give a retirement benefit of $346 per week in perpetuity without ever touching the $300,000 which has been accumulated with interest.
That to me would be a very creative scheme to solve the unemployment insurance and also put a lot of money into the hands of the people who earned it instead of just having the government taking it away from them.