Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak on this today. While I disagree with a lot of the premise of what the member has presented and proposed today, I still nonetheless want to recognize that he believes in this and that he is doing it for very altruistic purposes. It is not a personal benefit thing. It is something that he truly believes will be of benefit to workers.
Unfortunately, I do not think he is going about it the right way. In fact it starts with the very alarming premise that we should change the name of the program from employment insurance to unemployment insurance. Frankly, when it used to be called unemployment insurance, I never thought it should have been changed. I thought that was the stupidest thing the government did. It cost taxpayers, and ultimately workers, $5 million to change the name from unemployment insurance to employment insurance. Why? Because it is supposed to make people feel better. I thought that was pretty stupid. However it is equally unsound to spend another $5 million to change it back to a name that will make people feel worse, not that I think people felt a whole lot better having changed the name in the first place.
What the bill proposes is that we will get bigger benefits for a longer period of time. People will have to do less to receive them. It will eliminate severance pay and vacation pay before one can start collecting. On that specific point, the NDP member who presented the bill said that it was unfair that vacation and severance pay should be included and that people should be using it to help them find a job.
The reality is that when people end their jobs and get six weeks pay as a severance package and three weeks vacation pay, they are technically not unemployed until that runs out. Employers are saying that although they will not have the people working, they will still pay them as if they were working for the period of severance and vacation. I just wanted to make specific comment on that.
It also provides benefits for those who quit their jobs without just cause. The member has left a qualifier on it that there will be a waiting period, which he wants to eliminate in other places.
People are insured to have a job. If people personally choose to quit their jobs, it is not unlike people who insure their houses and then burn them down because they do not want their houses any more. First, aside from the concept of any criminal act of burning the house, one can imagine how any employer would feel if it was told it had to insure the house and if the person decided to burn it down, then employer would have to pay the person for the amount for which the individual insured the house. There would be an awful lot of people who would not worry about selling their houses. They would just light a match. Imagine the havoc that would cause.
Frankly it will create the same form of havoc inside the employment insurance program if people were to say that they have enough weeks now to quit their job, take a year long vacation while collecting these benefits and then find another job, work for the minimum period required and quit that job.
This bill promises more for less. Who can resist that? What a wonderful concept: sign on to this bill and people will more money, get it easier and get it for longer. However what will it cost society, employers and the workers themselves, the very people the hon. member wants to help, in terms of premiums?
I have looked, as I am sure he has, at the obscene surplus that is there right now. At least in theory it is there. In reality, it is gone. Just like Blackbeard used to run the high seas in days of past, looting and plundering at every opportunity, grabbing every dollar possible from every source, we have a government that taxes people. I think this comment has been attributed to the candidate who was the former finance minister and now running for leadership. Whether it is true, I have often heard it attributed that he said, “I have never met a tax I didn't like”.
The Liberals have said that they have lowered income tax and employment insurance taxes. However they raise so many other things in so many other ways that they are a net increaser of taxes, a net plunderer of the wealth, income and revenue of ordinary Canadians.
That is something we should probably look at because if something like this were to pass and even if the government, in a fit of remorse, repaid the incredible surplus it has, and I do not want to say an unparliamentary word as tempting as it might be, absconded from the fund and spent, this would erode that money down to a point where we no longer would have a sustainable margin or a rainy day fund, as it refers to it.
The current surplus nonetheless is on paper. This would mean ultimately that we would see not only no further premium reductions, which we should be seeing right now, but we would start to see increases in premiums in the future. We absolutely know that employment taxes kill jobs. The taxes that employers and employees have to pay are the things that kill jobs.
Employees say that they cannot afford to work below a certain net income, yet there are all these taxes that they have to pay on their income over and above income tax, which still goes into the pockets of the government.
Employers say that to have jobs for people, they have to get a certain return. They have to make a certain amount of money that covers not only wages, but all of the costs incurred by having people work for them. One of the those is the employment insurance premiums which they have to pay. This is something that will likely cause these things to be put up.
Our position is that families would be far better served if we in the House start working together, including the hon. member who brought this in who truly is concerned about workers, to develop policies that create real long term sustainable employment. After all, this is a safety net. This is for people who lose their jobs. Instead of figuring out how to treat them better when they lose their jobs, we should be working together to try to find ways not only so they do not lose their jobs, but so they do not continue to be, as in many cases, underemployed and where they can aspire to maybe a job with more responsibilities, more personal reward in terms of the type of work that they do and of course the pay that they take home.
The Canadian Alliance written policy on this is long established. EI premiums would be set by an independent EI commission based on recommendations from the Chief Actuary. The fund should be enough to cover the emergencies when people suddenly finding themselves out of work with a reserve that is sufficient to ensure that we can cover this in the event of a sudden downturn. A separate hard reserve, not unlike the trust the hon. member suggested, would be established to ensure the payment of benefits in periods of economic downturn.
Employer premiums would be experience rated, not unlike any other insurance plan that is out there, so employers that have a record of fewer layoffs than other employers in the same sector, not across the board, will pay lower premiums. In other words, employers that do not work the system within a given occupation will be rewarded for that. Employers that keep employees employed rather than this continual cycle of layoffs, which is again what I believe the hon. member ultimately wants to get at, will get a bonus in terms of lower premiums.
The frequency of maternity leave or sickness leave, however, will not affect those premiums. That is something which is beyond the control of employers and they will not be penalized for it.
Further, we continue to argue the concept that the best social policy for workers is a job, not a sum of money that they get because they do not have one. That is at best a crutch to prop up the system. The real answer is that we need to do something to create more jobs.
I believe it is irresponsible to place a great burden on the employment insurance account just because it has a paper surplus at this point in time. Premiums could be lowered for workers and employers rather than treating this non-existent surplus like some kind of lottery jackpot to be exploited. The hon. member offers basically a land of milk and honey to everyone without concern where these resources would come from and to afford the ideas that have been dreamt up.
Well meaning though it is, it would be far better if he would turn his attentions toward working with us to create real jobs, real employment, rather than how we will help and prop up people when policies of the government let them down and they lose the job they would far sooner have.