Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the bill today from my colleague, the member for Acadie—Bathurst, an act to amend the Employment Insurance Act.
I want to start by noting the comment made by my colleague from the Canadian Alliance. He made the comment that changing the name from unemployment insurance to employment insurance cost $5 million, and, as my colleague from Acadie--Bathurst has suggested, changing it again would maybe mean another $5 million.
From my perspective, if the name were the only issue and it would save $5 million, I am sure none of us would object. We would not change the name. We would keep the $5 million. We would make sure the workers and employers who paid into the plan would receive some benefit or, quite frankly, because the government uses the money for numerous other things, we would make sure it went into health care, into housing, which is needed throughout the country, and into infrastructure. There are certainly a lot of valuable uses for $5 million.
Therefore his comment that the name does not make a big difference is a point. However, as he was saying that, I was thinking that it really did not matter whether we called it unemployment insurance or employment insurance, it was kind of like calling it life insurance or death insurance. The reality is that if people receive that insurance because they are dead or they are unemployed they do not feel any better one way or the other. The name is really not the big issue here. Let us not get caught up in that.
However, I continued thinking about the name as he was speaking and I wondered what else we could call it. I thought about cash cow for the Liberal government or cash cow for finance ministers running for the leadership. One could call it a one-armed bandit because it takes in a lot more money than it gives out to the unemployed. There are lots of names out there if we ever decide to not get caught up with employment or unemployment.
My colleague brings up a number of issues related to the employment/unemployment insurance fund. I have dealt with most of the issues to which he has referred on an ongoing basis in my riding.
I want to take this opportunity to say that if it were not for the excellent work of the employees who work out of the northern employment insurance offices and the Brandon regional offices it would be a whole lot worse. They have been excellent to deal with. They have an excellent knowledge of the program. When we bring an issue to them they get back to us quickly. We have a good working relationship with them and we have been able to resolve a number of problems that have arisen as a result of employment insurance benefits being paid out.
Although those employees have been great to deal with, the bottom line is that we do have a number of problems. A lot of times the problems are directly related to the policies and rules that have been put in place by the department. The cards and the forms that have to be filled out are too darned convoluted.
I consider myself to be a relatively intelligent human being, as I consider are the staff of my offices, who are great individuals, but when we go through the process of trying to understand the cards and the forms, and everything it entails, it is not an easy system. I challenge anyone to try to fill out those cards with all the information that is required. It is hard for people who have lost their jobs and are trying to put food on the table for their family and get everything done. Sometimes there is some little clincher that they miss or they fill in the wrong box and then, because they have filled in the wrong box, God forbid, they have been fraudulent. This has happened. I am not joking. I say thank heaven for the excellent workers in those EI offices because we have been able to resolve some things.
Therefore, on top of being fraudulent, they have to pay back that employment insurance that they may have received, even though they really should have received it but EI says that they should not have. On top of that, EI fines them the equivalent amount of what they had to pay back. People must bear in mind that these are unemployed people making 55% of their salary, at the most, on employment insurance because it does not give the benefits that it used to give.
In the cases with which I have dealt it was rare, if ever, that anyone had been fraudulent. However they have been caught up in this whole convoluted process. There are a lot of issues related to that and I sometimes think it has been done deliberately.
The other thing is people in this position do not have recourse in the sense that they really do not have the right to go to court over any of this. People hope and pray that their member of Parliament or someone can advocate on their behalf, that they have a good regional office or that the people they are dealing with in their area can bring their issue forward, understand it and resolve it for them.
That does not happen in all cases throughout the country. There are people in certain regions who have ongoing problems because of the attitude some people take toward unemployed people.
Over the course of my lifetime I have been unemployed. As a high school student, and actually as an adult, I worked during the summers and then the employment was gone. I was a seasonal worker. I married and moved somewhere else and because I had worked the required period of time I was able to collect unemployment insurance.
Contrary to what my hon. colleague from the Alliance says, I did not relish the fact and say, “This is great. I do not have a job and I get to collect all this money on unemployment insurance”. I still wanted to get out there and work. This may shock the heck out of some people, but there was not always a job there, but I was lucky. I was able to find a job.
Over the course of my working life I also was on unemployment insurance because of maternity leave. As well, despite having a reasonably decent sick benefit plan in my workplace, in the course of one year I had the problem of having to have surgery and then had a sickness related to an injury. I used up all of my sick leave and I had to go on unemployment insurance.
I had been working all those years and paying into unemployment insurance and met all the criteria that used to be there and still had waiting periods. Quite frankly, why should people have to wait? They have paid the money into the insurance program.
This is probably one of the biggest bones of contention I have with my colleagues from the Alliance Party on the issue of pensions and insurance, mainly the Canada pension plan and employment insurance. I do not see it as a tax when I am paying it. I see it as an insurance. It is an insurance I pay as a worker. I do not begrudge paying employment insurance. Quite frankly, I consider the money I pay in employment insurance a very low cost insurance plan for a time when I might need it.
When I used that employment insurance plan it at least gave me a reasonable amount of money to survive on. Right now it does not do that. It has been cut so harshly by the Liberal government that it does not do the job any more.
When there is an insurance plan that 800,000 members of that insurance plan cannot ever collect from it when they meet the main criteria of the insurance plan, which is loss of employment, something is wrong. I go back to changing the name of the plan to a one armed bandit or a cash cow. Something is seriously wrong.
My house insurance covers a variety of different aspects. When things have happened, I have never had a problem collecting the money. The money has been there.
For unemployed people in this country it is a real problem not being able to collect.
I want to make a comment on behalf of workers. It has been mentioned a number of times in the last week or so in the House that workers in Toronto as a result of either being in a workplace that may have had SARS or in the hospitality industry which is not doing that well and workers have been laid off, because of the criteria behind employment insurance, those people cannot collect. Something is seriously wrong.
Another thing has been bothering me more and more over the last year or so and I do not want the government side to groan over this. Quite frankly I do not see myself as a pro-feminist kind of person but one thing that is becoming quite annoying to me and I am concerned about is that so many of the cuts and the changes the government has made have affected women in low income jobs and other areas far more greatly than anyone else. That bothers the heck out of me.
Obviously I could use much more time to speak to the problems associated with the employment insurance plan as it exists today. I support my colleague's recommendations. I hope the bill is passed by the House and goes to committee. If some fine tuning has to be done, as my Bloc colleague has mentioned, then let us do it.
Let us have an honest to goodness look at changing the plan so that it meets the needs of unemployed workers and of employers in this country.