Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to support this motion and indeed to second it. I thank the House for agreeing to unanimous consent so that I could second the motion. I was delayed in a committee and rushed over here but did not quite make it in time, so I appreciate the House agreeing to that.
I wish to congratulate the member for Ahuntsic. This is a very important motion and I want to thank her for the work she has done on this. I know the member has deep concerns about the health and welfare of low income families and social issues.
The motion before us is a small but important step in helping low income families who are on employment insurance keep pace with the cost of living. The motion seeks approval to index the family supplement to inflation for those families who receive the supplement and who are in receipt of employment insurance benefits. Regrettably, it is only about 11% of EI claimants who receive these benefits and there is still a maximum weekly benefit of $413 per week. We are talking about income support that for many families would mean that they are still struggling to make ends meet every month when they go on EI.
In speaking to the motion today and pointing out our support for it, I want to also put it in context. The hon. member mentioned, when she began her debate on the motion, that we have something like 1.5 million children living below the poverty line in Canada. We have something like 5 million Canadians living in poverty. In fact, if one were to look at the reality of what is taking place in various communities across the country to see the kinds of circumstances that people are in, one of the reasons that we have 1.5 million children and so many families living in poverty is because of cutbacks in the EI program.
Although this particular motion would give some small relief to some families that qualify, we still have a massive EI program with cutbacks. There is a $40 billion surplus in the EI fund and yet many people who were working and who are laid off, particularly if they are seasonal workers, no longer even qualify for the program.
I want to bring this forward because it is a serious situation and devastating for hundreds of thousands of families in Canada that cannot even qualify for the EI program anymore, even though there is a massive surplus sitting there that could be used to provide benefits for people. This particularly affects women who are part time workers and seasonal workers, so we really have to put this in context.
I would point out that this particular motion would be directed at those families who are EI claimants, but who are also receiving the Canada child tax benefit. In fact, the member has pointed out that the child tax benefit also has some indexation.
However, to put this debate in context again, I want to draw the attention of members in the House to the report that recently came out from the National Council of Welfare. Its spring 2003 report called “Welfare Incomes 2002” points out that hundreds of thousands of families across Canada are actually losing ground. The reality is that unfortunately some people who are on EI end up on welfare if they are not able to regain employment. In fact, the National Council of Welfare is “very concerned by the fact that the clawbacks to the federal child tax benefit discriminate against families on welfare”. In its 2001 report “Child Poverty Profile 1988”, it was estimated that only 66% of poor families benefited from the federal child tax benefit.
The supplement was received by 79% of poor two parent families, but only 57% of poor single parent families were allowed to keep the child tax benefit supplement. As women had most single parent families, the report believed that this constitutes discrimination on the basis of gender.
I want to flag this because it is a very important issue when looking at the issue of growing poverty in Canada. While the motion would certainly assist the 87,000 low income claimants who could benefit from this provision of indexation, let us recognize that we have a huge problem in terms of hundreds of thousands of families, particularly lone parent families, who are not benefiting from the child tax benefit.
Indeed, when the program was negotiated by Ottawa with the provinces and territories, there was a goal that no families would be worse off than they were before. Clearly, this has not turned out to be true and in fact there are many families who are indeed now worse off than they were before the child tax benefit.
The other thing that I want to add to the debate, in terms of bringing recognition to the serious problems we have with poverty in the country, is that HRDC is poised to announce massive public policy changes in moving from a measurement of poverty where we have used what is called the low income cutoffs established by Statistics Canada to a market basket measure. By the stroke of a pen this would redefine how we measure poverty in Canada. It would reduce poverty immediately by about one-third, but it would not in any way improve the standard of living of a single kid or a single family.
I put this forward in the debate because I feel that there are some glaring discrepancies in government policy. We are moving in a direction where we may change the way we measure poverty but we would not alleviate poverty. While I welcome the motion today, and that is why I wanted to second it because it is a step in the right direction, I wonder why the government would not have brought it in a heck of a long time ago to give benefit to low income families.
I want to put it in the context of this much larger picture of cutbacks that have been experienced by low income families, whether it is through EI, social income support, the child tax benefit, or lack of housing programs. We are facing a serious situation. We have a social deficit in the country where more people are falling through the cracks.
In my own community in east Vancouver, where we have had provincial cutbacks, people are now living in desperate circumstances and are finding it increasingly difficult to pay the rent, to meet basic food needs, to clothe their children, and some of those people are on EI. Some of them are on welfare and some of them are struggling in low paying minimum wage jobs.
I say to the members in the House today, who expressed interest in the motion, that we should approve the motion, but let us make a commitment, as the House did in 1989 when it supported Ed Broadbent's motion to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000, to make this a social and economic priority. Surely in a country as wealthy as Canada we should not have the United Nations chastizing the Government of Canada for failing to meet its commitments under various international agreements because aboriginal people and poor people are suffering so much as a result of the social deficit.
In closing, I wish to thank the hon. member for bringing the motion forward and I appreciate her work to draw attention to this specific issue and her concern on other social issues, but let us not lose sight of the real work that we need to do in redressing some of the disastrous public policy decisions that have been made. These decisions have victimized poor people in the country and left them isolated, marginalized, and in some places even criminalized as people resort to more illegal means, such as begging on streets. Look at what happened with the squeegee kids and so on.
I urge members not only to support this motion but also to focus on the bigger picture of addressing poverty in our country because it is something that can be done. We have the resources to do it.