Mr. Speaker, I too want to congratulate the member for Welland for bringing forward Bill C-279. I am going to touch on some specifics in a moment.
However, I also want to acknowledge the good work that the member for Acadie—Bathurst has done. Over a number of years he has been a champion for EI reform in the House. I believe in previous sessions of the House he had brought this bill forward for approval of the House.
The member for Welland has raised a number of very good points, but I want to touch briefly on what Bill C-279 actually does. It is trying to rectify an inherent unfairness in the employment insurance system. It is attempting to have the following categories no longer considered as earnings, so that when someone files a claim for employment insurance, the start of that claim is not delayed because he or she has been in receipt of a pension, superannuation, a retiring allowance, vacation pay, or severance.
I am going to put it in context in terms of what is happening in our economic climate. It is important because in effect when workers receive these payments it is actually money as a result of past service. This is money that is received as a result of the years they have worked or vacation pay for the year that they worked. Really, it is retroactive.
The argument when this was changed in the 1980s was that this should be considered as income arising out of employment. What that failed to take into account is that for many workers, particularly in the current economic climate, it is a buffer. It is a safety net for them.
What we are hearing in many of our communities is, for workers who manage to qualify, there is no guarantee that at the end of their employment insurance claim they are actually going to have a job.
I have heard from workers in Nanaimo who have talked about the fact that they are in their late 40s, or early or late 50s, they have worked all their lives in forestry, and their EI has run out. They have been sent for training as long distance truck drivers and there is simply no work for them.
For those workers who actually got severance pay, that money would have been a safety net for them when their EI claims ran out. Instead, they are forced to look at having to sell their homes or go on welfare. There is not much dignity for workers who have spent their entire lives in the workforce to be forced into those kinds of circumstances.
I want to touch on those circumstances. First of all, it has been mentioned in the House but I think it is worth repeating that the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development, on January 30, 2009, said, “We do not want to make it lucrative for them to stay home and get paid”.
The member for Welland raised the point that the average weekly benefits rate now is $335 a week. That is before one pays one's tax.
I do not know where the minister lives, but where I live I would challenge anyone to live on $335 a week. People have to pay rent and are lucky to get anything under $1,000 if they have a family. They have to buy groceries and might actually have to pay for clothing or education for their children. It is hardly lucrative.
I have not met workers who say they would rather stay at home and collect their $335 a week than go out there and have a good-paying job.
In this current economic climate, I want to speak to why these reforms for employment insurance are so important. Other members have referred to the fact that the NDP had proposed a motion that was going to see some significant changes to the Employment Insurance Act. It was going to look at reducing the number of hours to qualify, expanding the number of weeks that people could get paid, and increasing the benefit rate. All of these are very important in this economic climate.
I come from a community that suffers from the recession because of what is happening in the forestry industry. A couple articles have come up and I want to reference them.
Today, in the Nanaimo Daily News, the headline is:
Province's once-mighty forestry industry is now faltering badly. An estimated 22,000 forestry workers are off the job in B.C.
That is nearly half of all the forestry workers in British Columbia, out of roughly a 55,000-person workforce. This includes thousands in the mid-island region where my riding is. They remain idle as mills continue to close or cut back and logging operations are shut down as the ailing industry continues to struggle. Analysts see no light at the end of the tunnel.
In a report released last month PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that the nation's largest forest, paper and packaging companies hemorrhaged red ink in the last quarter of 2008 and the forestry analyst company does not paint a very rosy picture for the near future in this industry.
We recently had a representation from the CEP, formerly Canadian Paperworkers Union, about the fact that pulp mills are in desperate straits in this country because of a loophole in a tax in the United States. They are talking about the Canadian pulp and paper industry facing mill closures and the loss of its global markets over a massive United States green energy subsidy that could provide a $6 billion taxpayer handout to American pulp producers. This could cut as much as 60% of the cost of chemical pulp in the United States. It goes on to talk about the fact that it is going to crush the pulp industry in Canada if there is not something done about that subsidy, that tax loophole in the United States.
In the Times Colonist today there was an article that says: “Lumber industry bottoms out” and goes on to quote the president of West Fraser Timber who said he is seeing a bottom, not because markets are rebounding but because things cannot keep getting worse. Lumber prices are below the cost of production, forcing massive curtailments both here and in the U.S.
In that grim background, if we do not fix the employment insurance system, we are going to see workers having to walk away from their houses and many of them will end up on welfare. We are already seeing the welfare rolls rise in many provinces including British Columbia.
I want to talk about some of the companies in my riding and why severance and vacation pay are so important. These are the ones that have already collapsed. We do not know how many more are going to go down that road. We had a company called Munns Lumber which was a contract logging company based in a little community called Mesachie Lake. It is gone. It laid off all its workers.
There was a company called Ted LeRoy Trucking based in Chemainus. It was a full phase logging contractor handling all of the harvesting operations that grew in response to the move by major companies to get out of the business. This is part of the transition that has been happening in British Columbia. Leroy logs primarily for Timberwest Forest. Now Leroy Logging is also gone. We have seen a company that had a very proud history of providing heavy equipment to the forestry sector, so we are not only seeing forestry companies close down and workers lose their jobs, but also the companies that supplied them.
A company called Madill had 190 employees in its Nanaimo operation. That company had been in business as a heavy equipment manufacturer for the logging industry since 1911. It is gone. One of the saddest sights I have ever seen was the equipment from Leroy and Madill in a huge acreage filled with logging equipment. I drove by thinking that maybe there are some good things happening, only to realize that they were auctioning off the remains of what was once very proud forestry operations on Vancouver Island in the riding of Nanaimo—Cowichan. This has happened all over the province of B.C. and the rest of Canada.
It is absolutely essential that we make the changes to the employment insurance system to ensure that workers have the wherewithal to continue to provide livelihoods for themselves and their families. That is an important economic stimulus for our communities as well. We hear the other side talking about economic stimulus. If we want to provide economic stimulus in our local economies, we should make sure the workers have some income. They have to be able to pay their rent. They have to be able to buy food. They have to be able to pay for their kids to go to school whether it is supplies or clothing. One of the ways to make sure that economic stimulus happens at the local level is to give those workers some income.
I would urge the House to look at the very sensible bill that the member for Welland proposed. I would hope that all members in the House will support the bill, so that this is one step in that process of reforming the employment insurance system. With any kind of democratic process, we will see the government implement the NDP motion that proposed substantial reforms to EI to make sure that those workers and their communities can continue to have the kind of access to a safety net that we would all expect as reasonable Canadians.