Mr. Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to speak today in this adjournment debate, to come back to Bill C-55, An Act to establish the Wage Earner Protection Program Act, to amend the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.
As we all know, this bill proposes the creation of a wage earner protection program for workers whose businesses have gone bankrupt.
For quite some time now, the Bloc Québécois has been working with the United Steelworkers on proposals to amend the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, in order to ensure that employee wages and pension funds are the first debts in line to be reimbursed when companies go bankrupt.
That is why the Bloc Québécois was eager to support Bill C-55 when it was presented in this House a year and a half ago, in spite of the bill's imperfections and our many reservations.
However, certain principles of social justice were included in Bill C-55: employees must be paid for the hours they have worked; unlike large corporations, workers have nothing but their salary as a source of income; workers' pension funds are sacred.
For the benefit of the people listening to us now so that they understand, I would just like to go back over the bill a little bit and especially the wage earner protection program.
The federal government would cover up to $3,000 of the unpaid wages due to employees when their employer goes bankrupt. The payments made under this program are taxable but take other contributions into account.
This means that regardless of the value of the employer’s property, employees will get most if not all their unpaid wages. The Department of Industry estimates that $3,000 will cover 97% of the unpaid wage claims.
In return, employees who receive a WEPP payment will have to forfeit to the federal government any right they have under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act to file a claim up to the amount that they have already received from WEPP. The government would therefore be responsible for recovering the amount it paid to employees under WEPP.
This was an acceptable mechanism, and although obviously unprecedented in Canada or Quebec, it was satisfactory. The advantage was that employees would be paid more quickly. There was also a little provision on the pension protection plan that was very welcome as well.
So what happened to this bill? It passed unanimously in the House in November 2005, but then the new Conservative government that arrived on January 23, 2006 put it aside.
Furthermore, every time I asked questions about it in the House, the labour minister just said that it was coming. That is the answer I got last November 22.
So now I would like to know when it is coming. Can the parliamentary secretary tell me what is happening with this bill? When does he think he will come up with some solutions? There are between 9,000 and 10,000 commercial bankruptcies a year.
Does the current budget still contain the $32 million provision needed for the wage earner protection program?