Mr. Speaker, on September 20 I raised two questions in the House. One was to do with the fact that the Conservative government was spending $90,000 a day for an outside consultant to plan cuts to the Service Canada operation. Subsequently, I asked a question about the cuts to services at EI processing centres and what kind of impact that would have on Canadians. We have asked this question a number of times in the House and still have not received a satisfactory answer, so once again I am here raising the issue.
There are a number of questions that have come up, including the fact that there does not appear to be any kind of analysis or detailed analysis that is available to the public on the impact on services to the public and to the affected communities.
As well, when we are talking about Service Canada, we are not just talking about the processing of employment insurance claims, we are also talking about claims that involve payments for maternity leave, sick leave and compassionate leave.
The minister, on a number of occasions, has talked about the need for automation. What she has failed to tell the House is that the ability to apply has now been automated for five years, but that less than 50% of the claims are fully automated. The balance of those claims require some sort of involvement from an employee. Even a tiny anomaly on an EI claim requires a staff person to become involved. That ensures the person who filed a claim in many cases does not get his or her cheque within 28 days, which is part of the speed of service processing that Service Canada has committed to.
There are also some troubling statistics with regard to the kind of service when people need an answer about the delay on their claim. In September the abandoned rate for calls for EI has increased in the call centres. In two centres, Vancouver and Winnipeg, nearly one in every three employment insurance calls was abandoned in the last week of September. That means people call and they cannot get information about whether or not they can expect a cheque to pay their bills.
Over half of employment insurance callers are being told that their call cannot be transferred due to high volume. In the last week of September half of all CPP and OAS callers got a busy signal when they tried to call. They could not even connect with the interactive voice response system, so one has to wonder when Canadians are getting that quality of service, obviously the minister has not explained to Canadians what the impact of the cuts will be.
Why is the automated system still rejecting over 50% of the claims? Where is the Service Canada and HRSDC business case for closing all of the offices and laying off staff? Why is the government moving its operations from areas where office space is inexpensive to large urban centres where rental rates are considerably higher? With technology, workers no longer need to be centralized in urban centres. There are a number of points here that Canadians will be very interested in hearing from the parliamentary secretary.