Madam Speaker, as you likely know, I will be sharing my time with the member for Lotbinière—L'Érable.
The motion before us is one that is very interesting. We have a report that we will be concurring in, but which makes reference to a major problem. Since coming to the House in 1993, I have heard about one issue almost every day: employment insurance. The second thing we hear about, is that the premiums are disgustingly high. The third problem that we hear about, when it comes to employment insurance, is the negligence of the government, which decided to drastically cut benefits for the unemployed.
Another problem, since the premiums are too high and the benefits too low, is that the surplus has reached inordinately high levels. The surplus has grown so much that one wonders if helium was used. We have seen the numbers in the House. There really is a surplus. This requires no leap of the imagination.
And what happens when there is too much of a surplus? The government says it is going to pay down the debt. The surplus becomes a hidden tax. The government does not even have the courage to call it a real tax on workers and employers. They are the ones who have to pay for it. At the end of the year, the government tells us, “We are going to pay down the debt; we have ended up with an enormous surplus”.
The former Minister of Finance could not count, except when it came to his companies in the Bahamas. Then he had no problem counting. However, when it came to the government's budget, he was never able to tell us beforehand how big the surplus would be. What he was most interested in was how much of a surplus he could squeeze out of the EI fund.
Three times now we have been told by the Auditor General—first the former Auditor General, and now the current Auditor General—that the surplus in the EI fund was too big, that the fund had too much money. That is one way of describing it. I want to make this clear, because people are listening to us. In fact, there is no fund. It is a fund with no money, because money in the fund goes directly into the consolidated revenue fund of Canada.