Mr. Speaker, on March 26, 1998, here in the House, I asked why the federal government did not put additional money into the transitional jobs fund in order to put more money into the resource regions.
In the three months that followed, that is April, May and June 1998, $100 million less was paid out in employment insurance in the Lower St. Lawrence region than in the same months of 1992.
It was as if a decision had been made to break the agreement that had more or less been in place in Canada, that the resource regions would produce and manage the natural resources and ship them out to the major centres, where industry would process them. The people in the resource regions would get financial compensation, such as employment insurance, to allow them to have a decent standard of living.
Since the employment insurance reforms, that compensation has been taken away from those working in primary sector industries, without giving them the possibility of diversifying their regional economy.
Our question addressed this, and is still pertinent today. Is the government going to decide to put more money into the transitional jobs fund, which is financed from the government's day-to-day funds and not from the employment insurance fund?
That money could be used to implement projects in our regional economies. For example, those who work in seasonal industries such as tourism, logging and agriculture, would then have an opportunity to develop projects and businesses, to promote winter tourism, to process wood or to expand the milk processing industry in their own communities. In other words, they could benefit from the annual surplus collected by the government as a result of the reduction in EI benefits. With revenues totalling some $19 billion and $12 billion being paid in benefits, the government ends up with a $7 billion surplus.
Would it not be possible for the federal government to find some way to put money back into the transitional job creation fund, so as to allow our regions to benefit from that fund, to diversify their regional economies and to reduce their dependency on employment insurance?