Mr. Speaker, as far as those who are supportive of the bill, Canadian workers are supportive. I need no other validators besides Canadian workers. Those working and those who are unemployed have said to me for the past 20 years in which I have been an EI advocate in different venues that this is what they want to see happen. I have not met a laid off worker yet who has not said, “My severance shouldn't be touched”.
As far as the costing, it is simply a delaying tactic. Severance delays unemployment insurance. People can still collect the same amount of employment insurance at the end. If they are so unfortunate as to be unemployed that length of time, they simply eat up their severance and their entitlement to EI.
There is no cost to the EI system per se because of severance pay. What it does do is it lets people keep their house. It perhaps lets people keep their youngsters who may be involved in recreational or cultural activities in those activities for perhaps an extra month or two. It keeps people out of abject poverty hopefully until they can get a job. That is what keeping their severances does, at no cost to the EI fund. They will qualify for EI anyway and they will collect those numbers of weeks. The old argument was, if people received EI from day one, and had eight weeks worth of severance, we could take that out of the fund by that eight weeks.
In this day and age that is not the case. We all know that. The workers are entitled to it. They ought to be able to keep it. Hopefully the House will pass the bill.