Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank and congratulate the hon. member for Chambly—Borduas for drawing the attention of this House to this very important matter. I congratulate him for having framed this motion that I will support and that I find quite broad. It would be impractical to approach such a vast problem from a narrow-minded perspective.
Solutions to the problems facing older workers cannot be considered without also considering the communities in which they live and where they want their families to live. The communities must have the benefit of economic growth and good potential in order to survive.
It is impossible to look at this in isolation. We have heard a lot of good comments on that this morning. If we break it down, income support alone does not do it and training alone does not do it. I think we have to look across the board at the community, the economy and the place where older workers and younger workers live.
The impact of closures of factories and businesses, as suggested by the motion, affects more than only one demographic segment of our communities. It affects all the communities. There has to be an approach that takes care of all this.
With income support, I think we could start at the very base. We could look at those income support programs we already have and ask if they are meeting the needs. I know that residents in my communities who are receiving the Canada pension plan or old age security are struggling. They are struggling to survive. The amounts they are receiving are not enough in today's economy. We have seen the prices. The cost of living has increased dramatically for them.
If we look at the consumer price index, it does not tell the story. The consumer price index is growing very slowly. Inflation is under control. But if we look at the very basic cost of maintaining our homes and our families, we will see that non-discretionary spending has risen very quickly in the last few years.
Sure, the big items have not gone up. Automobile prices have not gone up all that much and perhaps groceries have not gone up all that much. Electronics certainly have not. However, let us look at the basic costs, such as the price of fuel, the price of heating our homes, the price of energy. Let us also look at the costs of insuring our homes and insuring our vehicles. In rural parts of the country, where a lot of these older workers live, mass transit is not an option. Mass transit is not available. It is impossible to raise a family and maintain a household without a personal vehicle. Those costs are very high.
I have heard suggestions from the governing party that since there is a surplus in the Canada pension plan and the economy is doing very well we should be accelerating a reduction in premiums. I would ask the government to consider the other side of that, the side of maintaining premiums. We have to watch it, because we do not want to choke employers and choke the economy, but I think we should be increasing benefits. The government should be increasing the amount of disposable income that is given to older workers, retirees and disabled people in this country.
I thank the member for Charlottetown for suggesting that we could look at people receiving the Canada pension plan who may be able to work for part of the year as long as they do not lose their Canada pension plan. Some of them, while they can no longer work a full time job because of chronic illness, may be able to do two or three weeks' work in a year. If there is no clawback of their Canada pension plan, this would be a benefit to their community, to their families and to them.
We see many sectors, such as the fruit growing sector and the agricultural sector, that have a chronic shortage of labour. They need a lot of labour in a very short period of time. These workers might be available at that time. It could benefit both those sectors and the workers. I think we have to be imaginative at how we look at this.
In my communities in western Nova Scotia, there has been a very serious downturn in the herring industry. It is cyclical. It will come back. It moves around. The herring quota has been reduced from 80,000 tonnes a year to 50,000 tonnes a year. A lot of people will not make EI this year.
These people are very good employees. They are able to go from one business to another. The employers have been working together to try to maximize the number of weeks that people can work. Everybody has been quite responsible, but many of the workers still will not have the required number of hours. They will not quite make it this year. Who are these people? Most of them are female. A lot of them are older, at 45-plus. They are single parents. They are one parent families. These are the people who hurt the most.
We need to have a little imagination as to what kinds of programs we could put in place. When we were in government, we had a very good program. We would create projects. They were called make-work projects, but they were always of community benefit. These people's time would be valuable. They assisted in the communities and were rewarded for it by earning income and earning their EI insurance, and they could maintain their families.
Training is no longer available to these people. There have been cuts in the training programs. I mentioned this earlier. Three months into the year, the retraining programs and the support programs from HRDC have been cut. Literacy training has been reduced. These are the basic building blocks that people need to be able to get out there.
We are seeing people who have been displaced from the herring industry. Shaw Woods was a very good employer, and a responsible one, but because of international market conditions it had to close down. The Weymouth lumber mill has closed, and the softwood deal will not reopen it, trust me. King's processors, again because of international pressures, had to close down. Then there are the tourism industry and the agricultural industry. They are all taking hits. We see less tourists coming into Nova Scotia from the U.S. market since 9/11, a problem that will not be solved tomorrow. It is a tough problem and it affects a lot of seasonal workers. A lot of these businesses depend on students.
What was the reaction at HRSDC? It was to slash the student employment program. It had already been cut because of the census figures. I hear it is being cut again. An average of 70 students less per riding will find work next year. Not only are we not helping the students, we are not helping the communities. We are not helping the local communities maintain a good, vibrant economy where these older workers should, according to the minister, reintegrate into the workforce. I think we have to look at all those things.
Then there are the CAP sites. I mentioned this earlier. I was in the community of Maitland Bridge two weeks ago. It is an isolated community, next to a national park It was big in the forestry sector. This community is losing its youth. There is no high-speed Internet access in that community. It is very important for Maitland Bridge to develop a CAP site. There are some sites 10 or 15 kilometres or more from where Maitland Bridge is, but in this community there are none. Now there is no potential of getting these sites, because that funding has not been restored. It has been cut.
It is important for us to do these things. It is important that we get broadband Internet access for all the communities. We have been able to do it for a lot of communities and we had the school program to get it into all the schools. We have it in some rural communities, but we have to get it into all rural communities if we want to protect the economy of the communities where these older workers live.
I am not calling for going back to the old ways of EI. I remember the EI trap. Rather than seeking full time work, people would sometimes get into that trap. That did not help, but we have to look at EI and make sure it is working properly.
In my community, because of the boundary divisions that were added, with some larger communities, some urban and semi-urban communities where the unemployment rate is zero, it is assumed by Statistics Canada that the seasonal workers in my community can work year-round. Therefore, they need a large amount of work weeks to draw EI. That is not true. At those rates, they cannot be driving 400 kilometres in the morning to work and 400 kilometres back in the evening. There is no way that is going to work. I think our boundary divisions have to be a lot more reflective of the communities where these people live.
We have talked about pilot projects. It was mentioned that some of them worked well and some of them did not. We have to review them, of course, but what do we continue to hear? We hear they are being studied and studied and they are being put forward. We continue to have the same thing, those same projects. I think we have to be more imaginative than that. We have to give flexibility to the very good civil servants who work for us at HRSDC, Human Resources and Social Development Canada, who know what the potential is in those communities. They know where to make the investments and what groups understand the local economy and can create the necessary jobs and training.
Again, let me look at another point. Let me bring this back to who a lot of these older workers are in my community. Who are the people we are trying to help? A lot of them are women. They depend on and need some organization and some leadership to be fighting on their behalf, because they are in isolated communities a long way from the centre.
What do we get from this government? For one thing, it slashed the budget of the Status of Women department. That was an insult. Then, a few days later, we heard that the remaining budget cannot be given to organizations that do any lobbying, advocacy or research. We continue to have a Status of Women organization in theory, but it cannot do anything, because we know that the REAL Women group believes that the money from the Status of Women should only be used to bring people together to do some brownie recipe exchanges.
I think it is time for us to get realistic and make sure that we take care of all of the people in our fair country.