Mr. Speaker, every so often around this place as members of Parliament, we get a chance to advance the aspirations and dreams of the people we meet, the folks we represent. This is one of those occasions for me.
Some months ago I was door knocking in the former township of Osgoode which is in the south end of the amalgamated city of Ottawa. I knocked on the door of a soldier who had just returned from Afghanistan. When left for Afghanistan, he left behind a five-day-old newborn with his wife and he went to serve out his mission in one of the most dangerous places in the world. He came back and applied for parental leave under the employment insurance system, and why would he not? The employment insurance program provides parental benefits to individuals who are adopting a child or caring for a newborn, which he was. The only problem is that during the time when he was risking his life overseas on our behalf, the period of eligibility for collecting parental benefits had expired. While he was sacrificing for us, the system expired the benefits he had paid for his entire life as a working Canadian through EI premiums.
It struck me as an incredible injustice that we could ask people first to pay into the employment insurance system with the promise that one day they might draw from it in order to extract the parental benefits that are part of the program and then send them into harm's way and tell them when they got back that the benefits for which they had paid would no longer be theirs.
I brought this matter to the Minister of Human Resources and she acted swiftly and decisively to have the finance minister put the following words into the budget documents:
For Canadian Forces members whose parental leave is deferred or interrupted because of the military requirements, the Government will extend the period in which they are eligible by another 52 weeks.
That is the right thing to do. It is about families and soldiers. We are all here because of those who sacrificed before us. We have a great duty to work every day and in our own small way to try and repay that sacrifice. If members look at the budget documents that I just cited, they will find that is exactly what we have done here.
I want to thank that soldier who brought this concern to my attention. It is due to his work that we were able to identify this problem and fix it for soldiers who make similar sacrifices in the future. I thank him and I thank the House for giving the occasion to serve people like the gentleman on whose doorstep I learned of this problem. I hope that we can all put aside our differences on an issue as unifying as this one to help our soldiers and our families, to uphold the great pillars of what make our country so great: hard work, family, patriotism, sacrifice.
With the passage of this budget and this particular provision, I hope we can do that.