Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity today to address Bill C-265, and the proposed amendments to it, which have now been grouped. I am glad the Speaker of the House found all three motions in amendment to be in order.
A number of years ago, in 1996, a change was made to employment insurance. This was the most significant change to EI and affected workers across the country. Some would have had us believe that the intention behind changes to unemployment insurance was to get people off employment insurance, to reduce their dependency on it. According to them, most people would rather receive EI than go to work. I can say that, everywhere we have gone, we have seen that this is not the case, and colleagues from across the country could say the same thing.
I would argue that the government is the one dependent on employment insurance. The surplus has been accumulating ever since the EI fund was created and now it totals $54 billion. Last week, theft from the employment insurance fund was made legal by a vote in the House of Commons. Ironically, when we finally vote on Bill C-50 tonight, that will seal the deal, and that will be that.
Bill C-265 seeks to re-establish the situation—I am not sure that that is the right word—in other words, it seeks to make employment insurance a little more humane.
People who receive employment insurance benefits get just 55% of their salary. Imagine what that means for people earning minimum wage. That is not at all uncommon in seasonal industries and tourism, for example. People working in the tourism industry earn little more than minimum wage, and most of those jobs are seasonal.
I have done the math, and it turns out that in most cases, 55% of minimum wage is much less than social assistance benefits. I should add that these employment insurance payments offer no benefits, such as a drug card—no benefits whatsoever. As such, that is a very low wage.
What does Bill C-265 seek to do? Employment insurance can be pretty complicated with all the formulas and so on. For example, some pilot projects use the 14 best weeks, but others do not even take that into account. That means the factor is 14. Consequently, for an individual who worked 12 weeks, the benefit calculation is still based on 14 weeks at 55%. That reduces the employment insurance benefit even more. This bill would see benefits calculated based on the 12 best weeks.
Some parts of the bill were not quite right, so that is why the amendments were made. When the committee members were studying Bill C-265 on employment insurance, they discussed the 12 best weeks and the 360-hour minimum for eligibility. The Conservatives proposed an amendment, and to everyone's surprise, the Liberals agreed to it. The Liberals refused to agree to Bill C-265 as written, including the 360-hour minimum for eligibility. They voted against this measure.
As it turns out, the Liberals have not changed their position on employment insurance since 1996. Let us not forget that that was when they were wiped out in the Atlantic region. They lost ground there because they brought in hours worked minimums for employment insurance eligibility, minimums that made people ineligible.
For example, a claimant needs to have worked 420 hours to qualify for employment insurance in areas where the unemployment rate is higher than 13%; 490 hours if the unemployment rate is 12% to 13%; and approximately 535 hours if the unemployment rate is under 12%. Those figures are approximate.
We thought things had changed since then. It has been nearly 12 years since the Liberals had their lesson and saw that changes needed to be made to EI, but they did not support us. I cannot wait to hear what the Liberal member has to say about that.
For years, I have seen Conservatives here in the House of Commons. Before they were Conservative Party members, they were members of the Canadian Alliance or the Reform Party. The only thing they said during debates was that we needed to decrease EI premiums, which would create jobs and ensure that more people were working.
How would lowering EI premiums solve the problem with fish processing plants in the Acadian peninsula, the Gaspé, Nova Scotia or Newfoundland and Labrador? At this very moment, crab fishing season is open, and workers in the fish processing plants are working only 20 hours a week. How can we solve the problem by lowering EI premiums when people have not accumulated the required number of hours to qualify?
Then, the Conservatives and the Liberals told us that we needed to change the employment insurance rules, because people depended on it. They took $54 billion from the employment insurance fund and put it in the general fund to pay down the debt and achieve a zero deficit. This was done at the expense of workers who lost their jobs.