Mr. Speaker, I congratulate you on your appointment. I am not sure whether to chastise you, criticize you, or promote you. During the last parliament you were the government whip. I guess I am giving you some credit because it was a very tight majority. You never lost a vote in that three and a half years.
Although it is difficult for us on this side of the House to say it, I think you did an extremely good job. Despite our political differences, I think your colleagues recognized that. I wish you the best in the chair. Being a former NHL referee, as has been mentioned many times, it comes naturally to you. This is probably a tougher forum than some of the ones you have refereed.
Bill C-2 is a replacement for Bill C-44 which died on the order paper when the election was called. It was to address some of the difficulties the government incurred following its draconian moves on the EI file in 1996. At that time The government inflicted a lot of punishment on seasonal workers.
It really revolved around the intensity clause, which meant that if one collected employment insurance over a period of years, one would lose 1% of the benefits, up to 5% if one collected over what is called a 20 week cycle over a five year period. In other words if one was a claimant for five years, one would lose 5% of the benefits. That would bring it down from 55% to 50%.
That does not seem like a lot of money to any one of us in the House, but my colleagues and I have done a quick calculation based on a minimum wage worker. Many workers in New Brunswick and other parts of Canada are earning minimum wage. In some cases it is as little as $6 an hour, or $240 a week before taxes, before EI premiums, CPP and all other deductions are taken off. With a $240 paycheque, how much does one have at the end of the day? It is not very much. I suggest in the order of $200 with any luck.
When our jobs ran out what did we do? Was there a safety net? There was, and it was called unemployment insurance. The name has now been changed to employment insurance. I guess it is a more positive name. No one wants to use the word unemployment. Employment insurance is the instrument we would look at for some protection and support when we are unemployed.
The intensity rule meant that a minimum wage worker would be entitled to $120 a week in employment insurance. That is what their benefit would be if they were unemployed. It would be 5% higher, somewhere in the order of $126, maybe $130 tops, if one had not claimed employment insurance at all. Basically, that is the straw that broke the camel's back.
The government was not being very responsible or responsive to its citizens at the time. I know some of the ministers in Atlantic Canada simply played hardball with the seasonal workers. They basically told the workers to get off their rear ends and go to work not realizing that work does not come that easily in some parts of Canada, particularly Atlantic Canada. I am still surprised at my colleagues from the united alternative, formerly the Reform Party, when they talk about lazy Atlantic Canadians. They have made that statement more than once. In fact it hung them in Atlantic Canada in the last election. They were out campaigning hoping to get elected while calling the people lazy, the very people they would have been representing in the House of Commons.
Seasonal work is not the type of work that most of those people would prefer. They would prefer full time jobs, 52 weeks of the year, but unfortunately that is not possible in some parts of the country.
When the government brought this in, it received a lot of criticism. In fact, that criticism was borne out in the election of 1997 when the Liberal Party lost 19 seats in Atlantic Canada because the feeling was that the government was not being responsive to the people it represented.
Atlantic Canada is the poorest part of Canada. We do not have oil in the ground at $40 a barrel. If we did there would be a big difference. We do not have a car manufacturing capacity and the benefits of an industrialized society. We will give all levels of government credit for making advancements but there is still a long way to go.
We still have fish plant workers and fishermen. We have woodworkers and people employed in the tourism sector. All of those are seasonal workers, workers who can only make a living part of the year and at the end of the year they are left to draw employment insurance.
When the government realized that it had lost those 19 seats in 1997, it decided it would do something about it. On the eve of the election last fall, it brought in a bill that would address this issue. In other words, it would eliminate the intensity clause. It decided that it had made a mistake, that the 5% punishment on seasonal workers was too much and that it was going to change it. I give the government credit for doing that.
Unfortunately, the legislation was held up in the House by the united alternative party because it does not believe in that. There was just too much generosity in the package for minimum wage workers for members of that party to swallow, despite the fact that they have swallowed themselves whole on the pension issue. They made a career of attacking big government and the generosity of government, and destroyed many political careers in the process, only to find out that every single one of them will eventually jump on the pension bandwagon which they chastized, criticized and condemned for the last 10 years of their lives. What else would we expect them to do on this bill? What do they do? They attack little people.
The government can be attacked on this as well because it is addressing the intensity clause. In so doing, it has eliminated the commission.
The commission is the body set up by the government to determine what the rate will be. Currently employees are paying $2.25 into EI. That is their premium. The employer is paying 1.4% above that. Effectively the employer is paying over $3 and the employee is paying in $2.25.
What has the government now done? By stealth, it has limited the capacity of the commission to establish the rate because the rate is too high. The rate could be set at $1.75 for the employee. That is borne out by the auditor, the chief actuary of employment insurance premiums. He states in his report:
It is likely that a rate as low as 1.75% could also be set for the year 2001 and kept for the indefinite future. Although this rate would contain a smaller margin of safety, the current surplus would still make it a reasonable option.
The government has simply eliminated the ability of the commission to set the rate because it is sitting on a $35 billion surplus in the fund. This is expected to grow to $50 billion in the next two years while the commission is suspended.
The rate could go down to $1.75 because the interest on that $35 billion today has to go back into the fund. That helps keep the rate lower. The reason the government will act in stealth is that the EI surplus is just a bookkeeping entry. The government even wants to eliminate that, because once it eliminates that entry it will be free to cash in the $50 billion and use it as it so desires. In fact it already has; this is just a paper transaction.
This will effectively allow the government to keep the rates higher. If it does not have the $35 billion, the interest on which helps to keep premiums lower, it will then have the ability to sneak premiums up when necessary. This is why the entire bill has to be revisited. The ability of the government to suspend the commission has to be eliminated.
The government has a history of acting in this way, especially on this file. Who else but this lonely group of us at this end of the House of Commons will stand to defend the lowly, seasonal, minimum wage workers? I give the NDPers credit. They consistently support the little guy, and that is what we are doing. We cannot leave it up to the government to do it because it has a horrible history of ignoring the little people.
What happens when those safety nets disappear which we see happening at the municipal, provincial and federal levels? What do the little people have to fall back on? We are not talking about the generosity of government. We are talking about a fund that they have paid into, expecting it to be there when they need it. It is called insurance.
How many times have we heard about people being duped by insurance companies where they pay in but cannot collect? It is pretty well the same. The government wants them to pay in. It wants them to pay premiums higher than they should be, but it does not want them to go to the fund when they need help.
For example, we have government departments acting in collusion to hit little people who cannot defend themselves.
I refer to an article that appeared in Saint John's Telegraph-Journal on Friday, February 2. The headline reads “Tax case against auctioneer thrown out” and is subtitled “Justice: Revenue Canada unfairly targeted businessman, judge rules”. The article about a businessman says that “Saint John auctioneer Tim Isaac's tax evasion case has been thrown out after a judge ruled that he had been unfairly targeted by Revenue Canada”.
Isaac survived this witch hunt only because he had the financial wherewithal to hire a lawyer to defend him. The judge came down hard on the Department of Revenue, which is now called the CCRA, Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. The better words for that would be “Revenue Canada”. That is what we used to call it.
Now we find the same thing happening to the lowly clam digger. What do clam diggers do? They go out right now in sub-zero weather—they go out in summer as well—to harvest clams in the mud flats by digging them up by hand. It is back breaking labour. These people are the working poor, there is no question about it. They average $6 an hour, maybe $8 an hour if they are lucky enough and strong enough.
I have just found out that there is another witch hunt underway, but this time it is Revenue Canada, now called the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, working with DFO, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and HRDC, Human Resources Development Canada, to take a look at some of these clam diggers' claims. They will also take a look at some of the buyers of these clams, because somehow they feel that the tax man is being cheated. This morning HRDC officials confirmed that they have had numerous third party reports concerning claimants drawing EI who have not worked, who did not dig enough clams to actually claim the benefits they are claiming. That is the long and short of it.
What are third party reports? Are they hearsay evidence? We do not know. No one knows. These are rumours, the same kind of rumour that allowed the tax people to go after Mr. Isaac. He hired a lawyer and the government was chastised severely by the judge in that case.
In this particular case we have 33 to 36 interviews by government officials—interview is basically another word for interrogation—of the lowly little clam diggers to determine whether or not they dug clams. They had no counsel in the room with them. They had no one representing them. Not one of them, and probably not all 36 of them pooling their resources together, could afford a lawyer.
Is this the type of government we have?
When people get desperate they do desperate things. One of the things that people want to do when they get desperate is to feed and clothe their children, particularly when it is the kind of winter that we are having now in eastern Canada.
We will never know what goes on in that room when two government officials interrogate the lowly clam digger. That is digging to the bottom of the barrel when one goes in and violates people's rights or, as our justice critic says, the charter of rights. Do the government officials read the clam diggers their rights when they go into the room and interrogate them? My feeling is no, the officials probably do not, because they know that they can kick the bejesus out of these little people, get away with it and have a minister sitting right over there defending their actions. In fact, it was government orders from right here in Ottawa that caused them to do this.
I am not criticizing the local HRDC officials, because if they do not carry out their actions, they are gone too. The government does not have any compassion for its own workers and has even less compassion for the disenfranchised, which is what these people are.
That is why when we stand up in the House we defend the little guy, because no one else is going to do it. The little guys cannot afford a lawyer or a consultant and there will be no one on that side of the aisle to come to their defence, and very few of us on this side. That is one of the few things I can give the Bloc credit for as well. It is not very often I defend the Bloc. They will defend their lowly woods workers and fishermen. The NDP will defend the little guy as well. So will we. The majority in the House will not do that.
This type of harassment of little people has to cease and desist. If the ministers involved had any respect at all for human life and human dignity they would get together, share the information, consult with the members on this side of the House and find a better way of doing this. In the middle of winter when it is damned hard to be make a living as a clam digger, what is now being done is wrong.
We will be proposing amendments to the EI bill. We are prepared to support it with some amendments. We do not want to go back to the old days of what they called the lottery, of working 10 weeks and loafing for 40. There must always be a balance between a system that is too generous and one that is too miserly and too hard on the workers. That is the type of balance we want to strike. That is the reason we will support anything that comes in to help the little guy, but we do not want to flip-flop too much the other way and make the system too generous.