Mr. Speaker, it is great to have an opportunity to speak to Bill C-241. I want to congratulate my colleague from Brome—Missisquoi for bringing the bill this far. We did discuss this before Parliament was prorogued and it was passed at committee. I am hoping this time it will not be such a close vote in order to get it to committee where the member for Chambly—Borduas and I, and others can have a look at it.
There has been a lot of activity, advocacy in particular, on the employment insurance issue over the last little while. Employment insurance at a time of an economic downturn is a particularly important piece of our social infrastructure. The idea of the two-week waiting period has been discussed quite a bit. My colleague from Madawaska—Restigouche has talked about this a lot within our Atlantic and our national caucus. This affects people in his riding in a very significant way.
The idea of even calling it a two-week waiting period is not correct. It really should be called a two-week “out of luck period”, or a two-week “too bad for you period”, or a two-week “no money for the family period”. That may sound funny, but it is a fact of life that many people lose their jobs. Unlike many Canadians, we sit in a very privileged place, do a wonderful job, and members of Parliament work hard, but we are well treated for that work.
Most Canadians really do not live much more than paycheque-to-paycheque. To lose a paycheque all of a sudden and be told at the very least they have to wait two weeks on top of the processing time, which lagged in late 2008 and early 2009, is most unfortunate. So this is a very important piece of our social infrastructure. When people need the money, they need it right away.
There are a number of ways we can improve EI. We have gone through these in the House before. An increase of the benefit percentage is another way of improving EI. We could increase the number of weeks. The government added some weeks in the last budget and then further in the fall added a specific group of people. We could look at what percentage of income people can make while they are on EI. There is a whole host of ways of looking at the difference between re-entrance and regular users of EI, so this is one period that is particularly important.
It is important to understand that there will be a cost. It is hard to identify the cost specifically, but the Library of Parliament indicates that there are three ways that the bill would increase costs. First, periods of unemployment lasting two weeks or less would then become insured. Second, extending the duration of the benefits of some people who find a job before their maximum period ends would impact on this. Third, it would increase costs because benefit deductions are calculated differently during the waiting period than during the other weeks of unemployment. So there is a cost, but we do not know what it is.
HRSDC has given us some different costs. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives supports the elimination of the two-week waiting period. It has suggested a costing of $765 million. We had a cost that was provided by TD Economics which suggested it might be $1 billion. I do not know exactly what the cost is, but the question for us is, is that cost worth it and more importantly, do we need to send a message to the government that at a time of economic difficulty was its response last year enough?
I clearly do not think it was. I want to quote from this year's alternative budget on employment insurance. It states:
The economic crisis, the first since major cuts were made to our EI program in the mid-1990s, has been an extreme “stress test” for Canada’s EI program. The program has failed and needs to be fixed.
There is no question that changes were made to our EI system starting in 1990 when Prime Minister Mulroney made the first changes to EI. That was the point in time in which the government no longer became one of the contributors to the fund. It was then left to employers and employees, and further cuts came later. We were in a time of economic distress where the needs were much different than they were at this economic downturn. Back then the issue was getting rid of the debt. This time the issue was making sure--