Madam Speaker, I wanted to speak in this debate simply to make one basic statement, and that is that I make no apology as a member on this side for the legislation that this government brought in a few years ago that reformed and changed the unemployment insurance, as it was then called, to employment insurance.
In the same breath I also would say that I support the changes that are before the House now, but the point that is important to me, and I think that I can speak for certainly many of the people in my constituency, is that employment insurance could not stay the way it had been for decades. It had to change and I think it still has to change. This is a temporary fix at most and what the government tried to do a few years ago, in my mind, was absolutely correct.
We as members of parliament here represent our constituencies and different regions of the country and, more important, different economic opportunities. I take the point that was mentioned in one of the newspapers recently that this debate seems to go on regional lines and that we have on one side the western argument where they are not in need of employment insurance as much as Atlantic Canada and so on and so forth.
It is not a regional issue at all, but it is an issue of economic opportunity in particular constituencies. In my constituency the economic opportunities have long been very good. My riding is west of Hamilton and for a very long time there was a very successful manufacturing industry in Hamilton and indeed there was a lot of wealth in the region. While many people certainly were on employment insurance from time to time, or unemployment insurance, for the most part they were not as dependent upon it as those communities perhaps that are more resource based, where there are tremendous fluctuations in price for commodities that can lead indeed to sudden intervals of unemployment and where indeed there has to be a safety net.
When I was young, and I still like to think I am young, when I was entering the workforce out of high school, in my family my father was a working class Englishman but it was a point of pride that was inculcated in our household that if we could possibly help it we did not go on unemployment insurance.
I have paid into it for many, many years, and when I started in the workforce I worked in the local foundry in my community and I worked in a number of the manufacturing plants in Hamilton, chiefly to earn money for my education, but a job was a job and our family did not have much money and I certainly had to get out there and earn my keep.
Never did I ever think that employment insurance, or unemployment insurance as it was then known, was my entitlement. I never felt, and I still do not feel, that simply because I may have put many, many thousands of dollars into the unemployment insurance program over my career, I do not feel that it is something I should be entitled to simply because I put the money in.
The way I was brought up to look at unemployment insurance was that it really genuinely was an insurance program for those who were unfortunate in their employment and suddenly lost work. That is what I think it should be now and I support it 100% in that context, but as time went on abuses did creep into the system. In my own community there were some very, very obvious abuses at the time of the amendments we made to the legislation a few years ago.
One of the most notable ones was this whole question of seasonal employment. The example that comes to mind most graphically in my region was where the school boards would hire the clerical staff, the janitorial staff and the custodial staff for 10 months of the year and then fire them for two months. Then they would go on unemployment insurance and then they would be rehired after the cycle.
This obviously became a culture that the staff at the schools came to accept, that it was their entitlement to be working for 10 months of the year and then get unemployment for two months.
What was actually happening in this process, in my view, was the school boards and the provinces that financed the school boards, instead of giving a fair salary to the workers based on 12 months of the year, what they were doing was that they were giving a lesser salary and getting the top-up from the taxpayer, indeed not from the taxpayer but from those who were putting generally into the employment insurance fund.
I always felt and I still feel that this is wrong, that this is not what employment insurance was ever meant to be. Madam Speaker, you can go across the spectrum and you will find, you could find, many examples of this where employers deliberately took advantage of the employment and unemployment insurance program in order to give less wages and indeed to in another sense increase their profits, because when an employer can give less wages by hiring a person for only six or eight months when in fact they should be hiring them for 12 months, what they do is they lower their cost of operation and in fact widen their profits.
I thought it was very, very appropriate to try to address this problem of deliberate seasonal employment for the benefit not of the workers but for the benefit of the employer, so the attempt that was done a few years ago to address seasonal workers I thought was very appropriate.
Another side of the equation is when we look out of my particular area to the country and we look into those ridings—I like to think of it; it might be in Ontario; it might be in Nova Scotia; it might be in Alberta or British Columbia—where the work is seasonal because it is resource based, this creates something of a problem too in another sense.
If we have a resource base, a resource that has been exploited, be it wood, be it fish, that relies on the workers to work for six or eight months of the year and then be off on employment insurance for four months of the year as a regular year over year thing, what we are in fact doing is that we are subsidizing the collection of that resource. That is fine in the one sense, but what then happens is that we run the danger of overexploiting a resource. If people can cut trees or harvest fish at lower than the real cost and deliver them to the marketplace, then we are artificially inflating our ability to exploit that resource.
Consequently, because I really believe that we have an obligation to protect the forest, I really believe we have an obligation to protect the fisheries and any of these other resource based industries, I found it very difficult sometimes to contemplate this idea that we automatically think it is the right thing to do to subsidize the employment insurance resource based industry.
Madam Speaker, one of the reasons why I support this legislation is there is another side to this equation: if you take that attitude too literally, not only would I be subject to accusations of being a rabid right winger but quite apart from that, if you take it too literally then you are not giving other parts of Canada an opportunity to maintain their communities.
Let us just separate regionalism for a minute and just look at northern Ontario. There are many, many communities in northern Ontario based on mining and the forestry. I think it is absolutely incumbent upon all of us as members of parliament to sustain those communities and their cultural traditions as long as we can. Madam Speaker, you have to strike a balance when you are thinking in terms of employment insurance and its impact on resource industries.
I do support the changes that we see here today because I think we have tried to make some adjustments because we did not fully appreciate the impact of what we were doing before. But time is passing. We are now into another century and we have to realize that even a program like employment insurance has to be revisited and modernized.
I thought there was a very wonderful suggestion being floated around over on the other side, and that was the suggestion that maybe employment insurance should be applied to self employed people. I think that is a very worthy suggestion from the opposition and should be explored.