Mr. Speaker, it is not only as the Bloc Quebecois critic for the status of women that I rise this afternoon in the House, but also as a woman who has paid employment insurance premiums all her life and who has never been able to get any benefits.
During my maiden speech in the House, reacting to the throne speech, I said that the Liberal government does not care about the realities and the hardships of Canadians and Quebecers.
I would again like to quote a sentence that caught my attention when Her Excellency, the Governor General of Canada, the Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, read the throne speech, where the intention of the Liberal government to “secure a higher quality of life for all Canadians” is expressed.
The first real evidence of this true intention to secure a higher quality of life was the minister's reform proposing a plan that is completely out of sync with the new social and economic realities of women living in Canada as well as in Quebec.
The minister knows very well that the first persons to be penalized by her new reform are the women, more than 70% of whom have precarious jobs and frequently rely on employment insurance because they cannot find a stable and well paid job.
Too often, these women are the sole support of a single parent family. They do not have a stable job, but must nonetheless support their children, feed them, clothe them and give them a good education, and they would certainly have wished for a little more compassion from the minister.
There are also some sections of the Employment Insurance Act that discriminate against women. Let me explain.
To be eligible for maternity or parental benefits, one needs 600 hours of work, while someone working in a high unemployment area can be eligible for EI benefits with only 420 hours of work. A woman living in the same area would need 600 hours to be eligible for maternity benefits. Previously, the requirement was for 300 hours or 20 hours spread over 15 weeks.
Moreover, the new eligibility criteria for parental leave are unfair to women who were supposed to give birth after January 1 and asked for parental leave but were unfortunate enough to have their child before that date. They cannot ask for the 35 week parental leave because there is no flexibility in the act. It is not their fault if they had their child at the beginning of December even though they were not expected to give birth until January 15.
What happens then? Did the government think about the adverse effects of this situation for these women and their families? Did the government not think that these women were also hoping to benefit from the new measures, however limited they may be, just like other women? What about the thousands of self-employed workers who were also forgotten?
According to Statistics Canada, self-employed workers account for 18% to 20% of the total workforce. The monitoring and assessment report confirms that this category of workers is experiencing strong growth.
Yet, these workers are still excluded from the employment insurance plan. We also know that women account for over 40% of these self-employed workers. Almost one worker in five is not covered by the new employment insurance plan merely because of the nature of his or her work, and that group is constantly growing in Canada.
Earlier, I said that some workers were forgotten, excluded from the act. There is no question that the Liberal government and the Minister of Human Resources Development lack vision and are not very familiar with the realities of the labour market.
Yet, in an HRDC release dated February 12, 1998, the then Minister of Human Resources Development and current Minister for International Trade said that one of the objectives of the employment insurance reform was to adapt the plan to the new realities of the labour market. The following is an excerpt from that release:
The objectives of the employment insurance reform were to reduce costs and modernize the plan to better reflect the social and economic realities facing all Canadians.
This is not what is happening, because self-employment is also part of the new social and economic realities.
The Liberal government and the minister are also acting in bad faith. During the last election campaign, the Prime Minister himself said the following during an interview given to the Canadian Press :
We realized that it was not a good decision in the sense that we should not have done it.
The Prime Minister was referring to the cuts made by his government to the employment insurance plan.
Even Minister Coderre said “After a majority Liberal government is elected, we are going to re-establish the process and ensure that the changes are appropriate and respond in large part to the realities and needs of the population”.
Employment insurance has become a privilege for the women of Quebec and of Canada. This is why the Bloc Quebecois concludes that employment insurance reform has been a double, nay, a triple, failure.
With a view to shouldering greater responsibility for the disadvantaged, a fair and equitable distribution of the billions of dollars in the employment insurance fund in the hands of the Liberal government, with a view to taking into consideration the endlessly increasing numbers of people living below the poverty line, with a view to helping poor families in desperate and terribly urgent need, with a view to providing the children of Quebec and of Canada with three meals a day, the Bloc Quebecois would have preferred the government to have presented two separate bills.
The first of these would focus on dealing with the urgent situations to which I have referred, like the mothers of premature babies who cannot take advantage of the new provisions. The second would concentrate on administration of the employment insurance fund. This approach would provide a prompt response to the needs of the forgotten members of society, while leaving the more technical matters to be debated in committee.
In its desire to share the wealth, and in its great magnanimity, the government prefers to gets its hands immediately on the huge surplus in the fund, and to forget about the people, to forget about all its fine promises, to forget about the dire living conditions into which it is forcing families in need in Quebec and in the rest of Canada.
I again call upon the government on behalf of my colleagues in the Bloc Quebecois for justice and social equity. Rest assured that the Bloc Quebecois is still prepared to pass improvements to the program quickly, separate from the debate on administration of the fund.