Mr. Speaker, I am following up on a question I asked about employment insurance. Since I asked that question, as members in the House know, the situation has only become worse. While we were away from Parliament, Canadians continued to be laid off in record numbers and employment insurance continues to be a huge issue for many Canadians.
Last week I had the opportunity to be in Toronto with my colleague from Don Valley West where we talked with people in his riding about employment insurance, people in organized labour, people working in anti-poverty, people who are being laid off from their jobs. They simply cannot understand why they do not have benefits. The Conservative government has abandoned them. The government does not seem to care. On the issue of access to EI, the Conservative government is silent.
The minister speaks quite often about 82% of people who are eligible to get EI are getting EI. That is a false argument which totally ignores the fact that people are being excluded from being eligible to get EI.
The Caledon Institute, which has done a lot of work on employment insurance, has a chart which shows that right now less than 44% of Canadians who are unemployed are receiving regular EI benefits. That has changed in the last number of years.
There are many who would say that it was changed for a good reason back in the 1990s. The government under Mr. Mulroney left the country in terrible shape. There is no question that changes had to be made and those changes were made. In the 1990s nobody was talking about stimulus. We never heard the word “stimulus” mentioned. It was the opposite. It was contraction. We wanted to get the debt and the deficit under control.
According to the December 2008 Caledon Institute report, “The Forgotten Fundamentals”, at last count only an estimated 44% of unemployed Canadians qualified for benefits under the so-called social insurance. Those were 2007 numbers. In Alberta 24% and in Ontario 29% qualified for benefits.
The report stated:
Some of Canada's most vulnerable groups--older workers, part-time workers, recent immigrants, new entrants to the labour force, persons with disabilities and low-wage workers generally--are typically excluded from EI.
We have a big problem. People are not qualifying for EI even though they have paid into it. It is a false statement by the minister and her acolytes when they say that 82% of people who are eligible for EI are getting EI. It just ignores the problem.
Another problem Canadians have, and this is one that I raised in the House last year on November 27, is the delay in getting employment insurance. The minister said it was not a problem, that everything was under control and claims were being processed in 28 days. We knew that was not the case. On December 19 I sent a letter to the minister to follow up on that. First of all there was denial and then I was told it was being handled. A few weeks ago the minister finally came out and said that the government has to put in $60 million to bring back people from retirement and hire more people to process EI claims.
This problem has been ignored. It has been put aside. Workers in Canada are paying the price. They cannot access EI when they want it. They cannot even get support from the government to get their claims processed. It is a shame. It is an abomination. This problem has to be fixed. When is it going to be fixed?