Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to the NDP opposition motion. I would like to thank the sponsor of the motion, the member for Sault Ste. Marie.
The motion reads as follows:
That the House recognize the harmful effects on working and middle-income Canadians of the growing income gap fostered by this government's unbalanced economic agenda, including its failure to reform employment insurance to ensure that people who lose their jobs during economic downturns are protected and trained, and therefore the House has lost confidence in this government.
First, I would like to thank the member for London—Fanshawe for sharing her time with me. She has given a good explanation of the problem faced by women with seasonal jobs. In many cases, these women cannot even work the number of hours they need to qualify for employment insurance.
Before I go any further, I would like to correct something. If I understood correctly—and we can check in the blues—the member for Blackstrap, who comes from Saskatchewan, said that after electing an NDP government for 13 years, that province now had a Conservative government. It is regrettable that the government of Saskatchewan, formed by the SaskParty, is not a Conservative government. It is a government of Conservatives in disguise, who convinced the people of Saskatchewan that they were forming a new party with new policies.
The member for Blackstrap, a Conservative member of the House of Commons from Saskatchewan, admits that the party in power in that province is not the SaskParty, but the Conservative Party. No one really wants to talk about the Conservatives who were in power in the 1980s, before the NDP, because most of them were put in jail as a result of scandals. We have to tell it like it is.
How many times in this House have the Liberals and Conservatives said that if the NDP were in power, we would head straight into debt because we do not know how to manage money. Not very long ago, the Government of Canada had a debt of $535 billion or $565 billion. It was not the NDP, though, that was in power and put the country into debt but the Liberals and Conservatives.
These corrections having been made, I want to start now on the subject up for debate today in the House.
The Conservatives boast that the economy is doing well and thousands of jobs have been created. They never say, though, that 55,000 well paying industrial jobs have been lost.
If the economy is doing well in Alberta, I congratulate them and am happy for them. It is not a matter of jealousy. At the same time, though, there is more to Canada than Alberta. Canada is the entire country. Why does the government not say instead that the economy is doing well in some places but it is worried because things are not going so well in north-eastern New Brunswick?
Four fish-processing plants have closed: two in Grande-Anse, one in Maisonnette and one in Anse-Bleue. The Conservatives do not mention that. They do not say that, at the same time, a paper plant was closing in Bathurst taking with it jobs that paid $30 an hour. They do not mention UPM in Miramichi, which just closed down, taking more than 600 jobs with it. They do not talk about that but just about how well the economy is doing in certain regions.
It is all very well to make fine speeches here and say that jobs have been created. The trouble is that they are minimum wage. People are telling us that they need three jobs to earn a decent income. The government says that jobs have been created, but many of them do not pay very well. I am not talking about Alberta but about other places in Canada. There is more to Canada than Alberta.
In Ontario, right now, they are getting ready to call for transfer payments, because things are not going so well in that province. Jobs have been lost in northern Ontario, in White River, in Hearst, in the factories of Ontario, and in London and Windsor. And there have been jobs lost in the auto industry. Nobody is talking about that.
In a country like ours, people do not agree with what they have been seeing in this government’s recent budgets. On the one hand, they will be giving $14 billion in tax breaks over the new few years to big companies that are making money. On the other hand, when we are talking about all the companies that have closed down, the government says it is going to provide $1 billion to help the manufacturing industry and paper mills in Canada. There is $1 billion to help the entire forestry industry, which is falling apart and where good jobs have been lost.
In my riding, people have had to leave home—and not just in my riding, this is happening in many places—to go and work in Alberta. They have had to leave their families and children behind and go away for three months. Then the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Human Resources and Social Development talks about the employment insurance system. Nothing has changed in that system for worker mobility in Canada. Absolutely nothing has changed.
She talks about the pilot project for Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. Why has this not been put into law? Why is it a pilot project? The Conservatives say they are the ones who created it. Excuse me, but this project was created by the previous government. The Conservative government has been asked to put it into law, to make regulations that would be permanent. But they are still playing with pilot projects.
The government changes its mind and then it brags about it. When the Conservatives were in opposition, the only thing they wanted to do was to reduce employment insurance premiums, no benefits to help families. They do not want to help families. They are more interested in investing in the big companies that are making millions of dollars in profits, like the oil industry. This year, it has a $22 billion surplus and people are getting robbed at the gas station. They are not getting robbed by the gas station owner, they are getting robbed by the big refineries.
Then we turn around and all those people are doing work with the new industry as cheap labour. That is what we have. There are people who have to work at three jobs. The government says that things are going well in our country and that it has created lots of jobs. But people have to have three jobs in order to survive.
How many women have to work in one restaurant in the morning, in another restaurant at night and in another restaurant on the weekend? How many people have to do that? They do not brag about it, but when we meet those people on the street, they are telling us. When we meet people at the shopping malls or when people phone our offices, they are telling us about the cheap labour occurring across the country.
Yes, it is going well in Alberta. Good for them, but that is not the answer to the economy of our country. The answer is not to take the Atlantic region and move it to Alberta. For those people who want to move from New Brunswick or any other place to work in Alberta, there should be the flexibility in the employment insurance to help them. Only 32% of women qualify for EI in our country. Only 38% of men qualify for EI. There is something wrong with the program.
The gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger and bigger. When the big oil industry makes a $22 billion profit and people cannot even buy food to put on the table for their children, and they have to have three jobs to survive, there is something wrong in our country. There is something wrong with the Conservative Party when it gives a $14 billion tax break to the big corporations and at the same time $1 billion to try to fix all the problems in the pulp and manufacturing industries.
We are not getting our share of economic growth. Ontario itself has proven it. It is not going so well in Ontario. The car industry is not doing well and the government is doing nothing. The only thing the government says is if people do not move to Alberta to go to work, they are lazy. The government says that if it changes the employment insurance program, it will discourage people from going to work in Alberta.
That is wrong for society. We are not building a good society when people in some regions of the country have to separate from their families to go to work for six or three months at a time.
For those reasons we have no confidence in the government.