Mr. Speaker, to start with, I would like to congratulate you on your appointment as Deputy Chairman of Committees of the Whole House.
As this is my first speech since parliament resumed, I would like to thank voters in the riding of Chutes-de-la-Chaudière who elected me for the third time and for the trust they showed in me. I can assure them that I will do my best to honour their trust. I especially thank those who voted for me. At the same time, as you know, Mr. Speaker, when we are elected, we must work for all our constituents, and this is what I pledge to do.
I am mentioning the election because this bill amending the Employment Insurance Act was introduced in the weeks before the election was called and an election was indeed called. As much as the government tried to blame the Bloc Quebecois for preventing the passing of the bill, it should be pointed out that we never got to vote on the bill.
We opposed it but I want to remind members why we opposed a certain part of the bill. It was because it made official the plundering of the EI fund surplus by the government to reduce the deficit or just show a surplus.
There was no vote and I will point out that the same thing happened with the bill on shipbuilding that I introduced. I was in the same situation. The bill had passed all stages, including second reading and clause by clause study in committee. Then suddenly the Prime Minister decided to call an election three and a half years after the last one. Why? Because he wanted to take advantage of what was favourable to him and his party. A number of bills such as this one died on the order paper. This is the reason the bill had to be reintroduced now.
This is not the topic we are dealing with today but the context in which a bill is introduced must sometimes be recalled.
I want to relate the bill to something that happened during the election. Many, at least in Quebec, deplored the fact that a lot of young people did not exercise their right to vote because they felt abandoned by the government in many ways, including with regard to employment insurance.
I think they are not totally wrong. I talked to some young people who did not vote. First, they had a problem with registration; they were not on the voters' list. Moreover, there was only one office in each riding where they could register.
This feeling was shared by many young people. They told me afterward that they felt ignored, that they felt like they were being treated differently and that they did not get the special attention they needed.
During the election campaign I often heard the Liberals, including the Prime Minister, try to ridicule the leader of the Canadian Alliance for wanting a two tier health care system. That is rather bizarre because, since 1995, we have had a two tier employment insurance system, one for those who have received employment insurance benefits before and one for those who have never received employment insurance benefits.
How is that? Some people have to work 900 hours to qualify, which is more than for others. Obviously I will not get into the number of hours required by region because, as members know, it varies from one region to the next depending on the unemployment rate.
I say that we have a two tier employment insurance system because there is one set of rules for one group and another set of rules for another. Yet the Liberal Party kept criticizing the leader of another party or a member of that party for alleged plans with regard to health, never realizing that there was a contradiction between the words and the actions.
Young workers were the first to be hurt by this two tier system for the new unemployed. Women were also affected. After deciding to stay home for a number of years to raise their children—and that is a choice they made—when they want to get into the labour market, and in some cases find their first job ever, women find themselves in the same situation as young workers who have never worked. The tough part is to work 900 hours to qualify for employment insurance benefits.
Let me digress once again. Lately I have seen the government ad we keep seeing everywhere, the one dealing with parental leave. That issue is not addressed in the bill but it is somewhat related to our debate. The employment insurance program is being used to provide parental leave to everyone. That is the impression we get but it is not so.
The mother or the father who has not worked the required number of hours to qualify for employment insurance cannot benefit from this program, where the leave has gone from six to twelve months as of, I believe, January 1.
What I also find outrageous about this program, which is not, in my mind, a real parental leave program, is that it uses the employment insurance program. The government is trying to look good by saying “This is our program”.
I sat on the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development when the consultations that led to the 1995 reform were carried out. The federal government has not put a single dime into the employment insurance fund since 1991, except to pay for outstanding deficits, which it does not have to do anymore.
Eligibility for the program was so reduced that the government now has a surplus that has reached a total of over $31 billion in five years. That is an enormous sum. It is almost as much as Quebecers provide to the federal government every year from all the various sources.