Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on Motion No. 515, which states:
That, in the opinion of the House, the government should continue to recognize the vital role of older workers in the Canadian economy and ensure its labour market programs and policies encourage older workers to contribute their skills and experience in the Canadian workforce.
I have no problem with the motion itself. How could I? Recognizing and supporting older workers is not only laudable but absolutely essential. The problem is that the rhetoric of the motion does absolutely nothing to take even a baby step toward that goal. It is as inoffensive as it is ineffective. So let me move beyond the empty words and address what needs to happen if we want to do more than talk the talk.
To walk the talk, we need to have a close look at what is happening to older workers in today's labour market. Let us begin with some facts. In 2004, the Employment Insurance Commission released statistics for 2004-05 indicating that older workers accounted for 21.3% of the long-term unemployed, even though they made up only 12.5% of the active workforce. While that study may be a bit dated, the reality has not changed. In fact, the recent economic downturn has only exacerbated the trend.
Older workers are disproportionately represented among the long-term unemployed. This is especially true in communities like my hometown of Hamilton where the manufacturing sector has been decimated. The same is true in cities right across the industrial heartland. Companies like Stelco, Lakeport, Hamilton Specialty Bar, Multiserv, Siemens and many others were institutions in our community. They were unionized workplaces where seniority mattered and where companies therefore had the benefit of the skills, experience and expertise of their long-tenured workers. But a senior workforce also means that when plants close or downsize, 60% to 70% of the newly unemployed are older workers.
One would think then that successive governments might have assumed some responsibility for addressing the unique issues confronting older workers in Canada, but despite often lauding our incredibly skilled workforce, they did nothing to ensure that these workers would remain a vital force in our economy. To this day we do not have a manufacturing sector strategy in this country. We do not have an auto sector strategy. We do not have a green industry strategy. Instead, we allow foreign companies like U.S. Steel, Xstrata and Vale to buy up Canadian companies without an ounce of a guarantee that they will protect Canadian jobs. It is absolutely disgraceful.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the very government that did nothing to protect their jobs in the first place is the same government that is also doing nothing to protect displaced older workers. These unemployed Canadians need to keep working. They need a few more years of income before they can retire. They cannot cash in their retirement savings; that would be cutting off their nose to spite their face. And surely we cannot expect them to sell their homes or take out a new mortgage. These older Canadians have worked hard all their lives. They have played by the rules and now, through no fault of their own, they have become incapable of building a secure future for themselves and their families.
It is time for the government to step up to the plate and offer real assistance to these displaced workers. Unfortunately, instead of setting up effective programs for worker adjustment, the Conservatives have been setting up barriers to re-employment instead. In the limited time available to me here, let me review just a few of them. They really are just the tip of the iceberg.
First, there is a bias toward high skills in today's demand for labour. This is a huge problem for displaced workers, especially those residing in parts of the country where opportunities for re-employment are very limited. As a nation, Canada has never had a culture of workplace-based learning. This must change. If employers actually invested in the continuous updating of skills and education for their workforce, not only would they benefit from increases in productivity and profitability, but our country as a whole would benefit by ensuring that displaced workers would have the skills necessary to participate in the increasingly high-tech economy.
I am not suggesting that the onus for training should fall solely on employers. On the contrary, the government too has an important role to play in promoting lifelong learning. However, instead of taking that role seriously, the government is actually responsible for many of the barriers that undermine skills training. We know for example that 40% of working-age Canadians have limited literacy and numeracy skills and that even these skills atrophy from lack of use in some workplaces. This has had a profoundly negative impact on the re-employment prospects of Canadian workers. Yet, what was the very first thing the Conservatives did when they assumed office in 2006? They slashed funding for literacy programs to the point where it now amounts to a measly $1 per Canadian. What a disgrace.
By cutting the support for literacy, the Conservatives have cut the legs right out from under older workers, in that literacy and numeracy are the cornerstones of successful skills development and retraining.
Similarly, the government's employment insurance system does little to encourage workers to participate in skills upgrading. On the contrary, it sets up further barriers.
I have spoken in the House many times before about the serious flaws in our EI system, and I will not reiterate them at length here. However I do want to comment on the training piece of it.
All federal training programs in Ontario have now been rolled into the second career program, which is partially funded by the federal government but administered wholly by the province. That is a smart move by the feds.
It allows the Conservatives to duck the heat on a program that is failing workers, by simply blaming the McGuinty Liberals. The problem with that strategy, though, is that laid-off workers are the ones who are paying the price.
Last September, the second career program ran out of money, so workers whose applications were in progress were told that they were out of luck. Through no fault of their own the doors simply slammed shut on them. Then in November the government opened the door just a crack. It announced new tougher eligibility criteria but also advised workers that funding for retraining would have to wait until the new budget year, which did not start until April 1 of this year.
There was no other issue over the past year that generated as many calls to my constituency office as the bureaucratic bungling of the second career program. People who had been approved before September suddenly could not start their programs because the money had run out. Then when the program was restarted, their prior approvals were disallowed because they did not meet the new criteria. So they had to start the process all over again.
However, under the tightened program criteria many then found themselves ineligible for the very program that they had been admitted to just a few weeks earlier. That was six long months during which unemployed workers watched their EI run down without any opportunity to acquire the skills they needed to return to the workforce. So much for the Conservative government's rhetoric that it will “ensure its labour market programs and policies encourage older workers to contribute their skills and experience in the Canadian workforce”.
It is little wonder that older Canadians are so overrepresented in the ranks of the unemployed. A couple of decades ago, the government at least offered some assistance for older workers so they could bridge to retirement.
In 1987 the Conservatives introduced the program for older worker adjustment, which gave income support to workers between the ages of 55 and 64 who had lost their jobs as part of a mass layoff. The program was not perfect, but it did allow more than 12,000 displaced older workers with poor re-employment prospects to bridge the gap between layoff and retirement.
Unfortunately the Liberals dismantled that program in 1997, and to this day no better alternative has been put in place. Essentially, the Liberals wrote off older workers as inevitable casualties of structural change in the Canadian economy.
We can and must right that fundamental wrong, but we cannot do it with the motion like the one that is before us today, a motion that is bereft of any concrete proposals.
If the Conservatives were serious about doing something for older workers, they would offer them income support instead of platitudes. However as I have said, that proposition assumes that the government really is concerned about the future of older workers, and perhaps even that assumption is overly optimistic.
When I observe the foot-dragging by the government on pension reform, I despair about the future of our country. Despite the fact that the NDP's motion on pension reform passed unanimously in the House as far back as last year, the government still has not implemented a single aspect of it. There is no improvement to the CPP. There is no super-priority that puts workers' pensions ahead of other creditors in cases of commercial bankruptcy. And perhaps worst of all, we still have more than a quarter of a million seniors living in poverty because the government has not raised the GIS to ensure that no recipient would be below the low income cutoff.
That essential piece of reform would cost the government a mere $700 million. Sadly, the government has chosen its business buddies over the very seniors who built our country. In the last budget the Conservatives spent $6 billion on tax giveaways for the wealthiest corporations but did not spend a dime on the poorest seniors.
I wish I had more time, but let me conclude by saying once again that if the Conservative government really cared about older workers then it would not have asked the member for Edmonton East to table this motion. It would have tabled and implemented comprehensive legislative reform, and frankly, hard-working Canadians deserve nothing less.