moved:
That the third report of the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, tabled on Thursday, May 31, 2001, be concurred in.
Mr. Speaker, I thank you for giving me this opportunity to address this motion. It should be remembered that during the campaign leading to the general election in the fall of 2000, everyone had stressed the need for a thorough reform of the employment insurance program, to give it a human side, a side that would truly reflect its objectives as a social safety net, so as to allow people who are out of work to have sufficient income to find another job through the plan.
Accordingly, the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities prepared a unanimous report in which it proposed 17 changes to the employment insurance program. It is important to point out that members of parliament had decided, following the mandate given to them by voters, that it was necessary to propose these changes.
The committee that tabled this unanimous report included members from all parties, in particular Liberal members, who were sending a very clear message to the government on the need to make changes to the employment insurance program.
These members included, for example, the member for Peterborough, the member for Shefford, in Quebec, the members for Whitby—Ajax, Egmont, in Prince Edward Island, Winnipeg South Centre, York South—Weston, and also members like the hon. member for Madawaska—Restigouche, whose riding is adjacent to mine but in New Brunswick and who is also facing a very difficult situation on this issue. There was also the member for Bonaventure—Gaspé—Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Pabok who, throughout the election campaign, kept saying “I will work very hard to bring about changes to the employment insurance program; if no changes are made, I will have to disown my government”. He has yet to do so. I believe that all these people acted in good faith when they proposed these unanimous changes to the employment insurance program.
Unfortunately, in the fall, after the regulatory period of 150 days, the minister decided to dismiss out of hand all these recommendations. They no longer included anything that was necessary or worthwhile, even though, as we know, the employment insurance fund has generated surpluses of some $40 billion since the Liberals took office.
As a matter of fact, we have had annual surpluses of $6 billion in the last four or five years, while some people have been starving because they have not been getting benefits long enough to survive until they get a new job. In my region alone, out of 17,000 people who get benefits, 3,500 exhaust their benefits.
This means that, for a certain period, they will receive no benefits at all. They will either have to apply for welfare, or withdraw the money they have in a RRSP or other investments, or, even worse, have no income and try to live on loans from friends. This is unacceptable because there are often families involved and those in this predicament are often most in need of these benefits.
This is the situation we are in. Members did understand the issue, but the minister's role is to do whatever she is told by the Minister of Finance. Her role is to gather in as much money as she can for the government. This is how the people opposite fought the deficit. They paid down the debt with the extra $5 or $6 billion a year they stole from the unemployed.
Now that we have surpluses, the only ones who are not getting any return on their investment in the fight against the deficit are the unemployed and those who contribute to EI, that is employees and employers. The government does not contribute a single penny to the plan. That has to be made abundantly clear.
The report contained, for example, a recommendation to eliminate discrimination against younger people. At present, in Canada, young workers must have worked 910 hours to be eligible for employment insurance benefits. However, in regions with a high rate of unemployment, claimants are required to have accumulated only 420 hours of work to be eligible.
As a consequence, young workers are leaving the regions for large urban centres. We are losing workers who were trained in our regions, people who went to school and acquired professional training, especially in areas like tourism and natural resources.
There is a skills drain because, to be eligible for benefits, young workers must have accumulated 910 hours of work. Worse, most of them never become eligible. Some 75% of unemployed young people who have paid unemployment insurance premiums never receive benefits.
When we meet young people and tell them about this, they utter one single word: robbery.
If a private insurance company were to act that way, its clients would soon leave it and the company would go bankrupt. Why are we faced with the present situation? Because people who pay premiums do not control the system.
Older workers find themselves in the same kind of situation. We had a good example of this last fall, when people from the Trois-Rivières area came to demonstrate. These men and women aged between 50 and 60, who worked for three different companies, said they had paid premiums all their lives and now found themselves unable to claim employment insurance benefits long enough to bridge the gap until they became eligible to benefits from the Régie des rentes du Québec and old age security because the employment insurance system is inadequate.
Let us remember that there used to be a program to help older workers. It has not been around since 1997. It was the Liberals who put an end to the program which made this fund possible. We did not necessarily want the exact same program, but all the members on the committee unanimously said “These are clients for whom we must find solutions. They are human beings, people who have contributed to society, people who, in many cases, have worked for companies for 20, 25 or 30 years. They were very competent in their respective fields, but now they do not necessarily have what it takes to be able to work in another sector. They no longer necessarily have the physical strength required”.
It is all very fine and well to have job retraining programs, but we are not necessarily going to turn a sawmill worker into a computer technician tomorrow, let alone in two or three years. This forces them to do things which they find very difficult, such as enrolling in courses solely to be able to continue receiving benefits, when they know very well that they will not be able to finish the course and find a job.
We have also noticed that, in our society, young people and older workers are less well organized. Getting organized seems to be much easier when it comes to trusts. It seems to be much easier when it comes to tax evasion. There are people who manage very nicely in these areas and the way has been left open for them to continue to do so.
But the screws have been tightened when it comes to the EI program. There are more stringent eligibility criteria, fewer benefit weeks and the end result is what we see. The EI program is not fulfilling its primary role as a social safety net, providing people with an income when they lose their job to tide them over until they find another.
Seasonal workers face the same situation. It is perhaps the worst in their case, at least in my region. We all know about the current difficulties in the softwood lumber industry. Yesterday, for example, we heard that there had been a 15% increase in the number of people applying for EI in all regions of Quebec, primarily because of the softwood lumber situation, but also because of the aftermath of September 11.
As a result, our seasonal workers are now in a situation where they are no longer able to receive their benefit cheques within a reasonable timeframe
Imagine what it would be like if we, as members of parliament, did not receive our paycheque, or if we received it two weeks late. What would the consequences be? How would we react?
When people' s income is between $250 and $300 a week in EI benefits, and this money is taken away from them, it means that their rent money and their grocery money is taken away. And that is not the grocery money for next week either, that is the grocery money for the week at hand. This is happening to people all over Quebec. I am sure that it is the same thing in British Colombia too, because they are experiencing the same crisis in the softwood lumber industry, but with an even more severe impact.
As a result of the government's ineptness, of its inefficiency and because of the fact that the minister was unable to take the steps to predict this increase in applications, it is not the minister who is being deprived of her cheque, but the people in the regions, and this is completely unacceptable.
We had proposed permanent solutions to these problems. It was something on which all members of the House agreed. I think that it needs to be repeated each time. It was not only the Bloc Quebecois' position five years ago, and that of the NDP at that time, or the Conservatives or the Canadian Alliance, but it was also shared by the Liberals on the committee. It took quite some time to come up with this consensus. We even made compromises in order to be sure that the minister would be able to follow up on our recommendations.
All of that to wind up being told by the Liberals “No, we will not be following any of the recommendations tomorrow morning. We will not consider any of it”.
The best answer from the government is in response to the self-employed. In our report it states that 16% of workers are self-employed. These workers have not had any security for a long time. It would be possible to create a program for the self-employed. It could be set up on a voluntary basis in order to reach them, the way we reach fishers, for example.
In the government's response, the minister—she has been a minister for many years, and the government has been aware of the situation of self-employed workers for many years—said “There are indeed 16% of self-employed workers. We will have to look into that. We will ask the committee to look into that matter again in the future”. If this is not laughing at people, I wonder what is.
It was decided that people should not qualify. In the end, if they did, it would make it easier for women to qualify for the federal government parental insurance plan, but it is not the case now. This means that many people are afforded much less protection and that has a detrimental effect on the general working conditions.
We have to realize that the Canadian government's position is based on directions received from the IMF and others. We still have documents from last fall in which we can read “Well done Canada, you are tightening things up. Keep up the good work. And above all, do not expand the EI plan”. If at all possible, these people are even further from the real world than the federal government. They do not cut wood or fish for a living; they are not the ones we depend on to feed people and build homes. These people are above all that. They have what they call an economic approach. But economic approaches do not feed people.
We have a responsibility for the distribution of wealth but the present government does not do anything in that regard. It scores a big zero in the fight against poverty. It cannot even use its main tool, employment insurance, to ensure an even distribution of the collective wealth despite the fact that members unanimously said that something had to be done. But no, it remains unequivocally closed.
There was a cabinet shuffle. Many ministerial posts changed hands. In my opinion, two ministers should have been changed: the Minister of Human Resources Development and the Minister of Finance. The Minister of Human Resources Development, because she is unable to convince her colleague of the need for a relevant social net and of the possibility to use the EI system to that end; and the Minister of Finance, because his reputation rests on the back of the unemployed, of those who contribute to EI.
Look at how much of the debt was paid back these last few years and look at the surplus in the EI fund. Paradoxically, these amounts are practically identical.
The system is very regressive. If we make $50,000 a year, our contribution is calculated on $39,000, but if we make $28,000, it is calculated on the full amount of our salary. In other words, low earners contribute on a 100% basis to the funding of the system, and their contributions are used as a regressive tax by the government, while those who do not pay any EI premiums—and there are all kinds of people in this situation, including members of parliament—have nothing to do with the funding of the system.
In this regard, the system is unfair. If it is to be used as a payroll tax, all citizens should pay a contribution calculated on 100% of their salary. Then, there would be some critics saying that the system is not so good after all. Members raised all these issues in the unanimous report.
I would also like to raise the issue of parental leave. Quebec has created an excellent program of parental leave which covers all pregnant women who stop working, not only those who contribute to the employment insurance plan, and this, in a more flexible way than the federal program. This Quebec proposal is praised throughout Canada. The minister responsible in Quebec introduced it to the other provincial ministers and they thought it was an excellent program, an excellent plan.
What is missing is the federal government's agreement to contribute its share so that Quebec can put its program in place. This is not complicated, and the law even provides that, if an employer or a province puts an equivalent program in place, the federal government must contribute its share.
But as soon as our good minister decided that federal visibility should be promoted, he decided that the federal government would implement a Canada-wide plan of 52 weeks. Some women would prefer to take a leave at 70% or 75% of their salary for 40 weeks, instead of 52 weeks at 55%. Particularly for low wage earners, 55% of their salary does not represent a high amount. At $7 an hour in Quebec, and less in other provinces, this does not feed the family. At least, if they received 70%, even for fewer weeks, this would allow them to do a number of things.
This program is an integral part of the Quebec government's family policy, which includes daycare for $5 a day. Yet the federal government has not been able to take these recommendations into consideration, even if all members of this House were willing to support parental leave.
I would like to conclude my presentation by repeating that we are experiencing difficult economic times at present. Is the recession going to end or not? There is one very clear manifestation of the situation: 15% more applications for EI in the regions of Quebec. The situation is probably the same in other regions involved with softwood lumber.
This means that, over the coming months, a number of people will start receiving EI benefits. In this period of particular need we have more surplus funds being generated within the EI fund. If this is not scandalous, it is not far from it.
In times of austerity, when hard times put demands on a program that is supposed to be a safety net, an unacceptable amount of surplus is going to continue to build up, and this too I feel is wrong. I think that here, as in other instances “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”.
Action must be taken to remedy the situation. This is why I hope that today, in connection with this motion, the hon. members I have listed, and particularly those representing the Maritimes and resource regions—including the Liberals—will rise up to say “Yes, the report did make a lot of sense and the House of Commons ought to send a clear message to the government”.
All committee members from all parties agreed these changes were appropriate. The government has decided not to follow up on the recommendations.
What would be needed is a clear position to be taken by all members of the House of Commons saying “We are going to support our colleagues on the committee; we are going to pass the message on again to the government but this time it will be even stronger, even more forceful. We will say that yes, our colleagues were right; yes, during the election campaign we were given the mandate to correct the employment insurance system. We have heeded what our constituents told us, and today it is not only the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development that is calling unanimously for this report to be concurred in, it is the entire House”.
If the members opposite and the members of all the other parties here in the House do not do this, I think that we will have failed to act on a clear and logical mandate. If anyone voted in favour of the unanimous report in committee and does not want the report approved, there is a problem. Something happened. Person were convinced by their constituents that changes were needed but, as time went on, they allowed themselves to be persuaded by their government that it was no longer acceptable and desirable.
Nor must we forget that the economic downturn has also been making itself felt in the central regions since the events of September 11. Right now, many people are unhappy with the delays. We are also hearing from the Coalition sur l'assurance-emploi du Bas-Saint-Laurent, from the Gaspé, the North Shore, Lac-Saint-Jean, and from people in New Brunswick, who are saying “If need be, we will come to Ottawa in the spring and tell them that this is ridiculous. When our benefits have run out, we will be good and mad and we will tell the people who told us they would change the legislation that that is what they must do, or pay the political price in the next election”.
Two weeks ago, the Minister of Human Resources Development came to Rivière-du-Loup. She announced two programs which were interesting but very limited in terms of those who could benefit by increasing their number of weeks of benefits.
During the press conference, a seasonal worker from the area said “Madam Minister, last year, I benefited from a program like that for four or five weeks. This year, the program does not exist. Can you not come up with a decent permanent solution so that I, as a seasonal worker who works very hard, might be able to have enough money coming in throughout my period of unemployment to be able to provide for my family?”
What members need to decide today is whether or not they will adopt this report.