Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River for sharing his time with me. I also want to thank the member for Hamilton Mountain for introducing this very important motion, as well as the member for Acadie—Bathurst for the amount of work he has done over a number of years to try to get the Liberal and Conservative governments' attention regarding the importance of looking at some dramatic changes to the employment insurance fund.
Prior to 1995, when it was called unemployment insurance, the fund was much more responsive to workers' needs. What we have found over the last 10 or so years is that the ability for the employment insurance fund to provide a meaningful social safety net for workers has been eroded, and now substantial numbers of workers across this country simply do not qualify.
One of the important reasons for having a viable employment insurance fund is that it protects the most vulnerable workers and families in the country.
In my own riding of Nanaimo—Cowichan, over the last number of years we have seen an erosion of the forestry sector. Of course, the deeply flawed softwood lumber agreement has exacerbated the crisis in the forestry sector. In my own riding and on Vancouver Island, we are also suffering from raw log exports. We are watching the resources from our communities being shipped somewhere else for processing. One after another, our sawmills are closing down, and of course the supporting industries to those sawmills are also closing down. We lost Madill, which provided heavy equipment to the forestry sector. That company had been in business for about 100 years, and it has closed its doors. This kind of carnage in the forestry sector has untold impacts on the rest of our economy. Whether it is restaurants, whether it is other service industries, whether it is clothing stores, they are all being impacted by the fact that these well-paying jobs are no longer in our community.
In the motion we are proposing, we are talking about eliminating the two-week waiting period, reducing the qualifying period to a minimum of 360 hours, allowing self-employed workers to participate, raising the benefit rate to 60%, and so on.
I want to put a bit of a face to this. When we talk about workers, we are talking about people and their families, and I want to quote from a couple of emails I have received.
Kirk Smith wrote, “I was under the false assumption that if I had contributed for 35 years, I would at least be entitled to one year's benefits, but the receipt of benefits is only based on the current year's contributions”.
Then he had some questions: “When the five-week extension of the benefits becomes law, will I be able to collect them after my claim has run out? Can the laws be changed to take into consideration the number of unclaimed years a worker has contributed to the plan? The current system seems grossly unfair, when only the current year of contributions is taken into account”.
He goes on to say, further on in his email, “I am slowly going broke”.
I received another email from Cathy and Wayne Kaye. It says in part, “My husband received word last Tuesday that his mill at Western Forest Products in Nanaimo is being shut down indefinitely due to the global economic crisis. The future of what was once the stronghold of the province's economic structure is dwindling into obscurity”.
I received an email from Shelley Osborne about her husband's situation. She wrote about the fact that he was only allowed 24 weeks of unemployment insurance, that he is 54 years old and has been in the forestry industry for 31 years, and that he was working with Ted LeRoy Trucking, which has now applied for creditor protection.
I have a letter that came out from a number of organizations, including the United Steelworkers, the Coast Forest Products Association, the Interior Forest Labour Relations Association, and so on. They wrote to the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development and specifically asked the minister to take into account that 28% of the current forest industry unionized employees have worked fewer than 420 hours in the past year and 39.6% have worked fewer than 700 hours.
I know many of us have received email after email talking about what it means to families to lose their jobs and then find out that either they do not qualify for employment insurance because they have not worked enough hours--and the 360 hours would capture a significant number of these workers--or, in my area, that they are affected by this anomaly that ties the unemployment rate to the Vancouver labour market.
The unemployment rate in Nanaimo—Cowichan is significantly higher, but because of the regional anomaly, people are paid for fewer weeks on a claim because the unemployment rate is lower in Vancouver. That makes absolutely no sense.
I have written to ask the minister to consider realigning the region so that the labour market appropriately reflects what is happening in Nanaimo--Cowichan, and the minister has the ability to do this. I have to tell the minister that in British Columbia, Vancouver Island is an entity separate from Vancouver. In fact, a body of water separates them. We need to have the Vancouver Island labour market considered separately from that of Vancouver. This would allow many workers to extend the length of their claims. I would urge the minister to take a look at that so that we do not have workers sliding off employment insurance and onto welfare.
There is a very good reason for us to talk about putting money into the employment insurance fund to allow workers to either qualify for benefits or to have their benefits extended beyond the five weeks that the government has offered.
One of them is called the multiplier effect. The multiplier formula put forward by Ian Lee from Carleton University shows that every dollar spent on employment insurance results in $1.64 being injected into the economy. Mr. Lee says that there is a much quicker response in the economy through providing people with some income because the EI money has little red tape attached to it and can be counted on to flow through the economy in a predictable fashion.
We know that when workers and their families receive employment insurance, they go and spend it locally: they buy groceries, they pay the rent, they pay their mortgage. We have a tangible impact on the local economy. To me it would make sense to make sure workers have an income so that they can survive and buy things in their own local cities and towns and villages. It is that kind of immediate economic stimulus that would have a direct impact on the health and well-being of our communities.
In the context of the discussion today, I want to remind Canadians who are paying attention that the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development said, “We do not want to make it lucrative for them to stay at home and get paid for it, not when we still have significant skills shortages in many parts of this country”. I would be hard pressed to say that on an average of $447 a week, someone is having a lucrative living. If the minister thinks that is such a great income, I would suggest that she try living on it and try to feed her family, pay her mortgage and maybe make her car payment.
I would urge members of the House to support the NDP motion, which would have our communities remain livable and maintain a quality of life that each and every one of us would wish for our own families.
A member asked if the NDP had costed these proposals. Absolutely. We have estimated that they would cost $3.33 billion. We had $57 billion in the employment insurance fund misappropriated by the current and previous governments. This money was used for deficit reduction. It was used in the consolidated revenue fund. That money should have been put aside so that when there was an economic downturn, as inevitably happens in an economic cycle, there would be money available for workers and their families and money available for significant retraining, because many industries are now having to restructure and are looking at the fact that they are going to retrain even their existing workers. That money was paid by workers and their companies, and that money should remain for the use of workers and their companies.
In closing, I would urge the House to support this very important motion, to support the most vulnerable in our communities and to vote “yes” when this comes up for a vote.