Mr. Speaker, in 1996 the federal government undertook its most comprehensive reform of unemployment insurance since its inception in 1940, rechristening it, ironically, “employment insurance”.
This reform denied benefits to six unemployed men in ten and seven women in ten and more than eight young people in ten under this plan and caused misery in the lives of hundreds of thousands of families.
The Liberal Party massacred this public security plan, claiming that it was important to develop the employability aspect.
While the Liberal government has been boasting for the past three years that the employment programs have been on target, the Minister of Human Resources Development has just revealed that of a mere 459 projects, representing spending worth $1 billion, 82% were unsupervised.
This sort of mismanagement of public funds reveals the urgency of establishing a poverty commissioner, who would, among other things, evaluate programs to avoid such an administrative and a political mess.