Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to speak in the House today to one of the most urgent issues in the new Canadian economy, income support for older workers. I want to speak to this issue from two perspectives. First, as the NDP critic for seniors and pensions, and second, as the member of Parliament for Hamilton Mountain.
Let me begin by painting a picture of what is happening in my hometown of Hamilton. Most members in this legislature will think of Hamilton as steel town, a city that has built its reputation from a strong and vibrant industrial and manufacturing sector. Not so long ago that picture would have been accurate. However, members may be surprised to learn that the largest employer in Hamilton today is neither Stelco nor Dofasco, but rather the service sector and, in particular, health care.
Let me take moment to describe what has been happening in Hamilton. The old industrial manufacturing economy of Hamilton has shrunk to but a ghost of its former self. The two big steel companies that used to employ over 30,000 people now employ about 6,000. The whole steel sector, which, as I said earlier, was the backbone of Hamilton's economy, is now about one-quarter of its former size.
In the steel sector alone we have lost 3,248 jobs in just the past five years from 35 companies. Some of the losses were from bankruptcies and plant closures, while others are the result of continuous downsizing where there are still more losses to come as the nature of the industrial marketplace changes in the global economy.
Unfortunately, the job losses did not begin and end with the steel industry. We lost Studebaker, International Harvester, Westinghouse, Proctor & Gamble, J.I. Case, Firestone and hundreds of smaller plants. These are just some of the big names from Hamilton's past. Sadly, the list of losses is still growing.
More recent ones that pop to mind, again from just the past five years, are Siemens Westinghouse with 332 layoffs, and Camco where 716 lost their jobs when the plant closed and 284 more workers ended up on temporary layoff. The Tiercon plant closure saw another 700 jobs lost and there were bankruptcies and plant closures at Rheem, Philip Environmental, Hercules, Mak Steel, Frost Fence, Dominion Castings, Cold Metal Products, and ACI Automotives. New permanent layoffs are happening every month in the industrial manufacturing sector in Hamilton and there is no end in sight.
I started out by referring to the old industrial manufacturing economy in Hamilton and I did that for a reason. This is a sector of the economy that is not growing and is not creating jobs. For the most part, the companies in this sector are very old and they have a very senior workforce. Of the workers losing their jobs at these plants as they close and downsize, 60% or 70% of them are older workers and, in part, they have been displaced as a result of government policies.
Yes, technological changes had a profound impact on the nature of the workplace, but so have policies such as free trade agreements that were first put in place by the Mulroney Conservatives and then expanded under the Liberals.
One would think that successive governments might have assumed some responsibility for addressing the unique issues confronting older workers in Canada and, to be fair, the Conservatives did act on at least one aspect of older worker assistance in 1987 by introducing the program for older worker adjustment which gave income support to workers between the ages of 55 and 64 who had lost their jobs as part of a mass layoff. The program was not perfect but it did allow over 12,000 displaced older workers with poor re-employment prospects to bridge the gap between layoff and retirement.
Unfortunately, the Liberals dismantled the program in 1997 without offering in its place a better alternative. Essentially, the Liberals wrote off older workers as inevitable casualties of structural change in the Canadian economy. Today we have the opportunity to right that fundamental wrong and providing income support to older workers is an important step in that direction. However, it should not be the only step.
Many older workers who lose their jobs want or must continue to participate in the labour force. This is especially true in instances where job losses are the result of bankruptcies. In these cases, workers often lose not just their jobs, but also their anticipated pension benefits and back wages.
It is precisely for those reasons that I introduced Bill C-270, the workers first bill, earlier this year which would ensure that benefits owed to workers will take super-priority over all other creditors in cases of commercial bankruptcy. All of us in the House who take seriously the issue of income support to older workers, no doubt support this legislation. I look forward to my bill receiving full support when it comes to a vote in the House.
Many older workers need to find new re-employment, but they face a number of unique and serious barriers to their job search. Let me review just some of those barriers. First, there is a bias toward high skills in today's demand for labour. This is a huge problem for displaced low skilled workers especially those residing in parts of the country where opportunities for re-employment are very limited.
As a nation Canada has never had a culture of workplace based learning. This must change. If employers actually invested in the continuous updating of skills and education for their workforce, not only would they benefit from increases in productivity and profitability but our country as a whole would benefit by ensuring that displaced workers would have the skills necessary to participate in the increasingly high tech economy.
I am not suggesting that the onus for training should only fall on employers. The government too has an important role to play in promoting life long learning. However, instead of taking that role seriously, the government is actually responsible for many of the barriers that undermine skills training.
Just last week we saw the government cut funding support for literacy training. Yet, we know that 40% of working age Canadians have limited literacy and numeracy skills, and that even these skills atrophy from lack of use in some workplaces. This has had a profoundly negative impact on the re-employment prospects of Canadian workers.
Similarly, the government's employment insurance system does little to encourage workers to participate in skills upgrading. On the contrary, it sets up barriers.
If our public policies did more than pay lip service to help unemployed workers, we would be fast-tracking older workers to programs for skills upgrading, retraining or real career change options. Instead, the EI system forces them to go out and spend time doing a useless job search for several months in the same sector from which they have just been laid off and in which layoffs are continuing, just so that they can prove that they cannot be rehired in that sector with their present skill set.
Why are we putting the onus on workers to prove the obvious? While they are doing what the government demands, they are getting frustrated and demoralized, and even worse, they are using up a huge portion of their EI benefits in this fruitless process. When EI is finally ready to consider these older workers for some kind of retraining, it then makes the process such a bureaucratic nightmare that it actually drives workers away. Even those who stick out the application process find that the majority of them get turned down for training. Only a very small number of those interested in skills training actually get to proceed.
Clearly, EI reform needs to complement income support programs if we want to deal effectively with the displacement of older workers in today's economy.
Finally, we must look at the economy as a whole. I have already said that the free trade agreements have had a profoundly negative impact on high paying industrial and manufacturing jobs in our country. The current softwood sellout that is being so actively promoted by the current Conservative government will have the same devastating impact on the workers, families and communities affected in the forestry sector.
It is time that we stop making our economic decisions based on what is best for the United States. It is shameful that we do not have a steel sector strategy in this country. We desperately need an auto sector strategy. There is profound economic potential in developing a green industry strategy.
Instead of pursuing any of these initiatives with any real interest, we have had successive Liberal and Conservative governments throw up their hands and stand idly by as high paying industrial jobs are replaced with service sector jobs at half the rate of pay or less.
Those who suffer the most are those who built our country, the older Canadian workers, whose labour drove our economy and whose taxes built the social infrastructure like our health care system that defines us as a nation. Older Canadians deserve more from their government and they deserve it now.
I am proud to support the creation of real income support for older workers.
