Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure today to follow up on a couple of questions I had in the House of Commons that relate to cuts the government is making to a number of different services. The first is the Canada Border Services Agency and the second is employment insurance.
My riding in Windsor has the largest volume of international traffic travelling between Canada and the United States. In fact, it ranks in the world's top class. We are seeing the CBSA headquarters office move to Niagara Falls. Despite the fact that a report said that it should be consolidated in Windsor, the government has decided to move it to a minister's riding at the expense of drugs and smugglers getting into this country and at the expense of a series of different problems that we will see emerge.
The reason I know that is that I have met with the men and women who serve so ably in the Windsor region and they will now have to communicate with supervisors 400 kilometres away from the most important border crossing that this country has. It has the highest volume and it has the highest issues that have to be dealt with. It is a border crossing that consists of four independent ways to get vehicles, trains, trucks and cars across to the Detroit region and then into the United States. It is a very sensitive region.
To relocate the headquarters to Niagara Falls 400 kilometres away, when executive decisions need to be made about whether to investigate, take down or take action on smugglers, drug runners and other types of things we do not want to have in our country, is wrong.
The second issue is the cuts to employment insurance in an area of high unemployment. We are seeing 73 people who are facing layoff. The government has backed off on some of them because of the pressure. It is wrong because right now people rely upon those cheques and services. In the division that is being cut and reduced, it recently won an award in Canada for service. The employees won an award and now they get a pink slip. It is unacceptable. We want to see the restoration of those services.
The parliamentary secretary said, “we are doing that by investing” when she was referring to public safety, and the other minister said that “no impact on persons servicing is going to take place”. That is absolutely not true. We know the government is cutting the Windsor service because of austerity measures. It has publicly admitted that. It has said that the reduction is taking place because it needs to reduce the CBSA file and the money in it to make way for changes with regard to the budgetary process.
We know the changes to employment insurance will affect the front-line people because we have lost the decision-makers who look at arbitrary cases for employment insurance. These are people who have been trained for a number of years to do that job. They have gone through several layers of training to become a processing person who actually looks at the cases, makes decisions and makes recommendations about someone getting employment insurance. That is critical because other boards and agencies have often tried to cherry-pick some of these workers because they are so good. However, we are showing them the pink slip right now despite the fact that they have the best qualifications and credentials.
There is the very important position of a youth service operator worker who does outreach for young people. In my region, we have 20% unemployment for youth. It is unacceptable and we should not be losing services right now because they are critical for serving people and keeping streets in our community safe.