Madam Speaker, basically what is happening is that there are students and part time workers who will never qualify for any benefits from the EI fund.
Self-employed people are not only paying the EI fund for an employee but because they are an employer, they are paying for being an employer as well. Therefore it is double the amount.
When they lose their job or if their business goes bankrupt or something happens they are never going to be able to collect on it. In these cases it is a simple matter of a tax. There is no linkage whatsoever to their employability.
Members have heard mention today that this is basically a phantom account because it is going into general revenue. It is a mythical account. It is as mythical as unicorns. It is as mythical as leprechauns, as mythical as that pot of gold. This is a pot of gold that the finance minister is hoarding. He always says it is there, it is over the rainbow. He says that if we ever run into trouble, it is going to be there for us. As a matter of fact, it is not. There is no fund. It is a joke. It is a cruel joke on behalf of the finance minister to all us taxpayers. It does not exist. It is all being rolled in through general revenue.
We have to appreciate the finance minister, the tax minister basically, for his humour on this. He tries to humour us and twist it by saying he is not the one responsible, that it is actually the auditor general who is forcing him to put all this EI fund as it were into general revenue, that he would not want to do it. He would not want to touch the idea with a 10 foot pole but the auditor general is the one to blame.
I do not know if we buy that. When the finance minister was in opposition he did not say payroll taxes were a problem for creating jobs. He did not say they were an obstacle in creating jobs. He said they were a cancer on jobs. He said that payroll taxes kill jobs. Now he sings a different tune. He obviously has a different set of glasses on now and has the gall to stand in the House and say he is saving up his slush fund, which does not really exist anyhow, this pot of gold, for a rainy day.
I do not know when he was telling the truth, now or then, one of the times at least.
Last year the EI surplus, the difference in the money that taxpayers put in and what was actually paid out, was $7.1 billion. Without the lowest interest rates in about 40 years and without the surplus in terms of employment insurance this government would not have a balanced budget. It would not exist.
Why does the government not come clean and make proper priorities? Right now we have a government that is still continuing, while it is taxing every working Canadian with this employment insurance that is bringing in over $7 billion a year beyond what it pays out, to give money to corporate welfare. There are still profitable companies receiving grants and subsidies. Bombardier was mentioned today in terms of a very lucrative contract it got because of contributions it made to the Liberal Party.
The government is continuing to spend close to $4 billion a year in foreign aid and on crown corporations like the CBC. Yet it is going ahead and sapping this money out of jobs.
Some economists had some things to say about this. A recent paper by Canadian economists Livio Di Matteo and Micheal Shannon found that for each one percentage point increase in payroll taxes it kills 44,400 jobs.
I ask the House and the finance minister, if he is watching, to dream with me. For every single percentage point he could lower the payroll taxes, whether CPP or EI, he would be creating more than 44,000 jobs. I ask him to please consider that and talk to that nasty auditor general who is forcing him to put all these funds toward the general revenue.
It is not just economists who are crying out about this. Over the length of my speech I will go through a number of groups that have problems with what the finance minister is doing with this. Some of the premiers have problems with this. Premier MacLellan of Nova Scotia has problems with this.