Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to address the motion from the Bloc Quebecois. Because time is so limited I will try to focus on one aspect of this motion. I wish to address the aspect of the EI fund.
A couple of minutes ago I asked my friend a very direct question about the EI fund. I said that I hoped the government had stored away this money very carefully and that workers and employers who have contributed more than $15 billion into the fund, which is more than they have received back in benefits, would want to know that it had been stored away very safely, that it had been invested and put away in a vault somewhere. My friend provided an answer that was a little evasive, a little less than direct. My friend said in his speech that the government has been ensuring that the EI fund is there so that we can go into the future, or some bromide like that.
The EI fund is a myth. The EI fund does not exist in any real way. There is no fund. It is a fairy tale. It is not exactly one of the brothers Grimm fairy tales but it is a very grim fairy tale. Just like leprechauns, unicorns and the fairies of the woods, the EI fund does not exist. It never has existed.
We have a situation where the government runs around telling people “If we mandate that money is taken off your cheques and sent to us, it will go into some fund”. It is very much like the Bre-X disaster of a couple of years ago. Somebody told people “Invest in our company. We have millions of dollars of gold reserves in the jungles of Indonesia that we will soon be drawing upon. We just need a little money to get it out of the ground. Pretty soon it will all come back to you”.
Just like the Indonesian goldfields, the EI fund is a myth. It does not exist. There is a note in the consolidated revenue fund, an IOU to the workers and employers who have contributed to this fund. A $15 billion IOU.
My friend who was talking in a rather evasive way about the fund should be more direct and admit that the EI fund does not exist. There is no money in there. People who have been paying into it for years and years have been misled. We see this happening often in a government that is armed with the ability to tax and to spend.
We see it as well in things like the Canada pension plan. For years people were led to believe that all the money they paid in premiums was going into an account and it was building up for their retirement, only to find out that it was being lent to the provinces at below market rates of interest and there really was not any money. We see it happening with the federal superannuation pension fund.
Whenever there is a fund of money, the federal government cannot wait to get its greedy little fingers on it. No matter where it came from, no matter under what premise it was taken from people, in the end it never ever uses it for the purpose it was supposed to be used for. This is another example of that.
Where did the $15 billion go? It is a great mystery.