Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Medicine Hat, my friend and colleague on the finance committee, for his question.
Employment insurance benefits, particularly those relating to seasonal workers, is a very important issue. The Liberals slashed these benefits after 1995. That created a situation which I do not think even the government expected, and the law of unintended consequences kicked in.
In many cases the slashing of those EI benefits resulted in people who worked seasonally going on provincial social assistance rolls and not working at all. I would assume that the hon. member would agree with me that that created a greater reduction in productivity and human enrichment than would have existed previously.
That being the case, my personal views on this would be that we should investigate and revisit the notion of individual EI accounts. There was a study done in the U.K. a couple of years ago. It was reported in the Economist magazine in the fall of 1997. It studied the idea of having individual EI accounts that people would pay into over their lives. Some of the contributions would be taken from those individual accounts to top up those who draw more frequently.
That type of change would provide an incentive for people to not draw frequently. It would have some of the impact which I believe the Liberals were trying to seek in terms of reducing abuse of the EI system by way of an incentive method, as opposed to purely through a penalty or punishment oriented method that ultimately did not have the effect Liberals wanted.
I am sure the hon. member agrees with me that shifting the burden of social assistance to the provinces certainly did not help in any way, shape or form. In fact it prevented many of these people from participating in the workforce.
It is a complicated issue. There is not a simple, 12 second answer to that. However, I would enjoy exploring the issue with the hon. member at any time in the future.