Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak in the House on my party's behalf about this important bill, Bill C-50.
I think it is important because it shows the Conservative government and the NDP's true colours when it comes to employment insurance. It is quite disturbing. This is a bad bill, and we do not support it.
We are not the only ones in Quebec who do not support this bill. People are pretty much unanimous. Unions are unanimous, and they represent 1.2 million workers. If we consider the families of those workers as well, over 2.5 million of the 8 million people in our province are against it. So are all unemployed workers' organizations.
The people most affected by this bill will be unemployed workers, and their organizations do not like it. I will go on to explain why they do not like it. The forestry industry is unanimous in its opposition as well.
The Canadian Federation of Woodlot Owners has spoken out in favour of this bill, but when asked if people in Quebec felt the same way, they said no. We came to the same conclusion. The reason such unanimity exists in Quebec is that the Conservatives are turning their backs on Quebec, and so is the NDP.
Why does everyone agree on this? My colleague from Dartmouth—Cole Harbour explained why earlier: this bill is discriminatory because it introduces the utterly distasteful and unjustified principle that unemployed workers fall into two camps: good ones and bad ones. This bill is also mean because it is designed to exclude as many people as possible.
Earlier, my Conservative colleague said that this bill targets long-tenured workers. It is arbitrary because it excludes workers who have worked fewer than seven years. Nobody who has worker fewer than seven years will be affected by this measure or benefit from it.
In addition, all workers who have worked for more than seven years but who did not contribute 30% of the employee's premium for 10, 12 or 15 years, for example, depending on their situation, will also be excluded.
And individuals who have been unfortunate enough to receive employment insurance for more than 35 weeks will be excluded, even if they have worked for more than seven years. Who is left? Not very many people, considering that everyone with a precarious job is also excluded. When we do the math based on the government's approach, we reach the conclusion that only 6% of EI recipients can hope to benefit from this bill. That is a far cry from 190,000 unemployed. We are talking about roughly 47,900 people.
When officials come to talk to us about 190,000 unemployed, they say that this will extend over three years and so we have to multiply by the number of generations of unemployed. At that rate, we could say that instead of spending $21 billion a year on national defence, our government will spend $420 billion because the spending is spread over 20 years. You can take that sort of logic to extremes. But, in a budget debate, the government is used to quoting figures based on a snapshot of the economy at a given point.
How many workers are unemployed at present? Between 1.7 million and 1.8 million. How many people are receiving benefits? There are 765,000. If we take that figure and multiply it by 6%, we get 45,900.
Why is the government misleading the House and the public? By inflating the figures, it is trying to make people accept the unacceptable, namely principles that are completely disgraceful and totally discriminatory. That is what the NDP is doing. The government is making entitlement contingent on hours of employment, how much the claimant has paid in premiums and how many weeks of benefits he or she has already received.
The Conservative member said that long-tenured workers are people who have worked hard, as if everyone else had not worked hard. He said that they are people who have paid taxes, as if everyone else had not paid taxes.
We do not buy that. We cannot support that. Parliament is going to support discriminatory rules, but we are totally opposed to that. This bill is a symbolic political gesture that the government is trying to justify by dressing it up in lace and frills. It is also an insult to people's intelligence. It is important to say here that the government is not going to address the need for comprehensive EI reform with piecemeal measures like these, which create good and bad classes of unemployed workers.
The parties, including the Conservatives, have agreed on some measures in the past, measures that we in the opposition unanimously agree on here today, including for example, improving accessibility to employment insurance, since the majority of workers have been deliberately excluded from EI benefits. The previous government wanted to accumulate a surplus and use that money for other things. So unemployed workers and employers were relieved, not to say robbed, of $57 billion. The government used that $57 billion for other things.
These measures include the 360-hour eligibility criterion with, of course, the possibility of a 70-hour reduction, based on the number of unemployed workers per region. Instead of 45 weeks, 50 weeks of benefits are needed, as well as 60% of earnings. At present, people received 55% of their income. These are some of the measures on which we agreed. Our NDP friends have been fooled by the smoke and mirrors, and have forgotten these crucial measures, along with the notion of being entitled to benefits based on good faith. Furthermore, the two week waiting period must be eliminated.
Instead, we have a government that has locked up the employment insurance fund. It is making sure that premiums remain at their minimum, so there are not enough resources to improve the system, even though everyone agrees that the current problem is not related to premiums. People are willing to accept higher premiums in order to benefit from social measures that will allow people who unfortunately lose their jobs to continue to feed their families.
We are seeing the old Conservative theory of taking away every possible means, so they can later justify the fact that they do not want to improve conditions for our citizens. The Conservatives did this with the GST. They are doing it again with employment insurance premiums.