Mr. Speaker, I asked a question recently of the Minister of Human Resources Development regarding EI and the changes to EI that have had such an impact on the riding I represent. I was not at all satisfied with the answer. In fact I do not really know where the comments of the minister came from.
The minister maintained that it was our party which has been calling for a reduction in premiums. Clearly our party has been fairly constant in our position that we want the eligibility to be increased and the levels of benefits to be increased, but we certainly do not want the premiums to be lowered. That certainly was not our prime motivation.
The New Democratic Party has been looking at the impact of the cuts to EI for quite some time. In fact our EI critic, the member for Acadie—Bathurst, has toured the country recently, going to virtually every community, getting input from working people and asking them about the impact the cuts have had on their working lives. Certainly the feeling has been that the current system has had an impact greater than I think the government even realized when it introduced the recent changes to EI.
My riding of Winnipeg Centre has seen a cutback or a withdrawal of funding of $20.8 million. One can imagine the impact it would have on any community to pull out that kind of capital.
Looking at the inverse, if a business were to come to Winnipeg with an annual payroll of $20.8 million, one could imagine that any level of government would pave the streets with gold to try to attract that type of business to the riding.
Certainly this has had a devastating effect. The riding I represent has two of the poorest postal code zones in the country. Already an awful lot of people are living very close to the poverty line. It is a very marginal area. To pull $20.8 million out of that community meant that many more people were pushed over the fine line from living marginally close to the poverty line to living in abject poverty. It has had a huge impact.
We believe the changes necessary go far beyond what is being hinted at or alluded to.
We believe there have to be dramatic changes in the eligibility. We want at least 70% of all unemployed people to be eligible for benefits. They should be getting benefits in the neighbourhood of 60% of their working earnings. They certainly should not be penalized the way they are now in terms of clawbacks, where if their income is over a certain level they have their benefits clawed back.
One of the harshest rules that has come into effect recently which has caused the biggest inconvenience is the divisor rule, where the benefit is calculated using all of the 26 weeks preceding the date on which one files, including the dead weeks that one may not have worked. Obviously rolling those weeks where one has no income into the average will bring down one's monthly benefit.
Again, I do not believe the government realized how sweeping this would be. Cases came before the public hearings held by our critic. People came forward who had previously received in the neighbourhood of $350 per week. Their weekly cheques are now $38 per week. Surely this was not the intention of the government. We are hoping that substantial changes will be put into effect in the next budget.