Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise on this NDP motion to establish a real social safety net in this country with employment insurance benefits that actually go to most of the people who lose their jobs. Right now Canadians are experiencing the worst economic climate that we have had in more than a generation, the worst since the Great Depression. What they are finding is that the employment insurance structure has been gutted. They are finding that indeed what they have been labouring under is false representation from both the former Liberal government and the current Conservative government, and that when they pay employment insurance premiums and they lose their jobs through no fault of their own, that they will be protected and their families will be protected.
Canadians are finding that is just not the case. In the budget that the Liberals helped support and got through the House this week does absolutely nothing to give an additional worker benefits. Not a single worker, who did not qualify before the budget was put up, qualifies now that the budget has gone through the House. The smoke and mirrors around adding a few extra weeks, for the minority of Canadians who qualify, does not change the fundamental problem that we have in this country: tens of thousands of families losing a breadwinner and tens of thousands of families not being able to access the employment insurance that they paid for, for years.
This is criminal. We are talking about Canadians paying into employment insurance to protect themselves and their families. Yet, with the meltdown we have seen in the softwood lumber industry as a result of the infamous softwood sellout that killed tens of thousands of jobs across the country, and continues to kill jobs across the country, the majority of softwood workers, as is the case in the majority of cases, cannot rely on employment insurance benefits.
We were talking about the shipbuilding sellout, which is the next bit of legislation that the Conservative government has brought in. The shipbuilding workers, who lose their jobs, cannot necessarily depend on having employment insurance benefits there when they need them to pay the rent, to keep a roof over their heads, and to feed their families.
In the meltdown we are seeing in the auto sector, the meltdown we are seeing in the steel sector, in all of these cases the workers cannot depend, Canadian families cannot depend, on employment insurance.
This is a crisis that the government should have responded to because the NDP certainly provided fulsome reasons why employment insurance needed to be totally reformed so that it actually provided benefits to those who lose their jobs. Yet, the Conservatives refused to do anything to treat that fundamental unfairness and the Liberals said that it was fine because they did not really care about employment insurance and they backed the Conservatives on the budget no matter how bad it was.
The results are what we see. Essentially, the victims of this false representation, that we have an employment insurance program, a social safety net in this country when clearly we do not, are the 45% of them who qualify for employment insurance, only 45% of men. It is even worse for Canadian women. Only 39% of Canadian women qualify for employment insurance.
What that means is that people who are losing their jobs across the length of breadth of this land are left with no social safety net, left with no means to feed their families, and left with no means to keep a roof over their heads.
This is purely criminal to leave Canadians to themselves when the government has so clearly taken care of bankers, corporate lawyers and big business, showering billions and billions of dollars in tax gifts to the wealthiest and most profitable companies in this country, even though they have been cutting back their workforces. There have been no conditions, no strings attached, just shovel the money off the back of a truck. Yet, for the employment insurance fund, $57 billion was essentially taken out of that fund and is not serving to protect Canadian families. That is absolutely ludicrous.
At a time when there is no greater need for employment insurance, no greater need for benefits to support those families, $57 billion was simply ripped off Canadian working families, taken away, given away in tax benefits to the big banks and their record profits and to oil and gas companies and their record profits. There is something fundamentally wrong with this.
That is why the NDP is moving this motion today. We are saying that we need to increase benefits and benefit protection, eliminate the two week waiting period, reduce the reference period so that more people can qualify, allow self-employed workers to participate in the system as well, and increase benefits to 60% of income based on the best 12 weeks. We are also saying we should encourage training and retraining. Why? Here are a couple of reasons why.
At the same time that most Canadian workers now do not qualify for employment insurance, another theft took place and that is that the benefits have been cut in half. We have already mentioned that 60% of Canadian women and 55% of Canadian men do not qualify, but for those who qualify, their benefits have fallen on average to just $335 per week. For a family, that is below the poverty line.
Employment insurance is no longer the safety net holding families above water. It is a safety net that is badly frayed but lets most people fall through to the bottom. For the 40% of women and 45% of men that it catches, it holds them below water, below the poverty line, while they struggle to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. There is no more compelling reason than this for major employment insurance reform and yet the Conservatives and Liberals absolutely refuse to do this.
This not only benefits the families and provides the social safety net that the vast majority of Canadians want and need, it also helps their communities. For every dollar that we invest in employment insurance, we are getting a multiplier effect of about $1.64 according to most of the studies, including the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, which said very clearly that every $1 of employment insurance, because it is spent locally, multiplies another $1.64 into the community, creating more jobs.
There are tens of billions of dollars that the Conservatives have thrown away irresponsibly. It was the most irresponsible use of Canadian resources possible. That tens of billions of dollars went offshore to the banking industry in the Bahamas and oil companies in Houston, Texas. The tens of billions of dollars that Conservatives love to shovel off the back of a truck to their big business colleagues did not create that multiplier effect.
The $57 billion in employment insurance premiums should be channelled back in. For every $1 of employment insurance premiums that, I should reiterate, have already been paid by the workers, it creates another $1.64 in local economic stimulus. This is a no-brainer.
We in the NDP are bringing forward this motion. We are certainly hoping it will get support from all four corners of the House. I hope the Conservatives would understand that what they are doing is criminal when they refuse to allow families to get the employment insurance premiums that they have paid for and that the courts have ruled belong to the families, not to the government.
The issue is very simple. If the House adopts this motion, the government must adopt the policy and move to make those changes. There was one thing that I admired about the Conservatives when they were in opposition. I disagree with the Conservatives fundamentally on a whole range of things. A lot of their members of Parliament are nice people, but I disagree with them fundamentally on a whole range of issues. One issue we agree on is that the prime minister of whatever party should respect the will of Parliament.
If Parliament were to adopt this motion, Conservative MPs should be putting pressure on the Prime Minister and the finance minister to adopt these policies, to help Canadians, to ensure there is a social safety net in place, to ensure that Canadian families facing layoffs and the tens of thousands of Canadians who have been laid off over the last few months and have lost their jobs in the auto sector, softwood lumber, shipbuilding sector, fisheries and agriculture, that all of those individuals have employment insurance that they paid for when they need it to keep a roof over their heads and food on their plates for their children.