Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Mississauga South for his question and comments. This is very interesting.
The former Minister of Human Resources Development, the hon. member for Papineau—Saint-Denis, was quoted in Le Journal de Montréal , in February 1999, as saying:
There is no employment insurance fund. Let us be honest. The money was spent. If we no longer have a deficit in Canada, it is because these funds were used as indicated in the budget, for the health sector and for other investments made by the government.
People are told that if they work and have to contribute, it is so that they will have an insurance if they have the misfortune of losing their job. It is so that they can collect that insurance until they can get another job.
In order to make it easier to contribute and have that protection, the government made it a universal insurance. Everyone must contribute, even though not everyone can benefit from employment insurance, because some people are protected by collective agreements and are very unlikely to lose their job, or because there will always be work in their field of activity.
We should have an independent fund to manage the contributions made to the employment insurance program. Since these contributions come from employers and workers, a joint labour management group could look after the fund, like those that manage retirement funds in companies, and that fund could be used by those who lose their job.
A reserve could be built up for bad years, but the fund would truly be managed independently. In some cases, money could be invested to promote employability if an activity sector has no future and it is necessary to retrain people so they can find new jobs.
This would offer much more flexibility than using the employment insurance fund like communicating vessels, like the government's cash cow. Therefore, 60% of the people who work week after week, who put money aside, thinking that they will get help if they have a problem. But they come to realize that they contributed for nothing and that their money was invested in other things.
I think it is outrageous to do this. If an insurance company had done this in the private sector, it would have been taken to court a long time ago for misappropriation of funds.