Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak in support of the bill, although I would say it is critical support. I say this because in many respects the bill is inconsistent, as some of my colleagues have already indicated, in terms of what benefits are covered for what people. I will speak to that concern a little bit.
I first want to acknowledge some of the very important aspects of the bill that we should celebrate and thank the government for moving on. Currently it is the case that employment insurance claimants can access sickness benefits and subsequently access parental benefits. However, at the moment, those same claimants cannot access sickness benefits during or right after they claim parental benefits, because of a technical problem with how the law works. Bill C-44 would amend this. It is extremely welcome and I thank the minister for moving on that.
The Canada Labour Code code changes that will protect the jobs of people who have taken time off work because a child has gone missing or, worse, been murdered as a result of a Criminal Code offence, or a suspected Criminal Code offence, are also welcome. We can all understand the deep trauma and debilitating effects on parents when a child is lost in that way. Therefore, making sure that they are not penalized in the workplace is very humane. The fact that it is 2012 and this is coming into effect only now suggests that many elements of good sense do, unfortunately, take a bit too long to make their way into our legal system. Nonetheless, I thank the minister for her earlier speech outlining this change in the law.
I would like to talk a bit about some of the problems. I mentioned inconsistencies in how this is being approached. Some of the inconsistencies stem from a general problem with our employment insurance and federal benefit system of approaching things in far too ad hoc, piecemeal a fashion, not looking at the overall picture and structural dimensions of unemployment and other related or similar causes for people needing assistance. Instead, we are ending up more and more with an employment insurance system that looks a bit like the tax code, which we are all so keen to attack for it being unprincipled and full of all kinds of piecemeal provisions, without any overarching coherence. Our employment insurance system is approaching that point, and although the benefits in Bill C-44 are very welcome, they add to this piecemeal, ad hoc approach.
Let me give a couple of examples of why we are concerned that something is being moved on but in an inconsistent way that speaks to the rather limited ad hoc approach the bill feeds into.
It is great that once the bill is passed, the labour code will protect the jobs of those who are employed. Obviously I am talking about parents who lose their children, where a child goes missing or is killed through a criminal offence. The labour code in these cases will protect the parents' jobs, and that is great. That should be the case. However, there is no good reason to tie the benefit itself, the grant to the parents, to the fact of someone being employed, especially when the funding is coming from general revenue and is not considered an employment insurance benefit. We do have a problem with the fact that not all the funding for the bill will come from general revenue, but at least this benefit, the benefit to parents who have a missing or murdered child, will come from general revenue. Therefore, there is no technical reason not to be consistent in who receives the benefit. Yet it is being treated as if it is somehow an employment insurance benefit, because it is being linked and limited to those who received $6,500 a year of earned income in the previous year before the benefit.
There is no logical reason why parents who lose children in the way this bill is contemplating merit the benefit if they have been employed in the past to a certain threshold level, while parents with lower incomes, who are unemployed or otherwise, would not qualify by this standard if they also lose a child in the exact same way. The trauma is no different. The debilitating effects are no different. The undermining of their responsibilities, even if they are not responsibilities in the workplace, is no different. Others have responsibilities in their lives, whether they are employed or not, that would be undermined, indeed made impossible to fulfill, if a child is abducted or worse, murdered.
Here are two examples that anybody could recognize as valid. There are stay-at-home parents who are not earning a formal income in the workplace. They are working and in this day and age we all recognize the fact that this is work. Many of us would hope that the system would eventually evolve to the point that this work would be recognized as a form of employment but at the moment that is not the case. There are stay-at-home parents who have other children they are taking care of or an elderly parent or they are trying to hold things together in the house, and they lose a child in the same circumstances as somebody who is employed or had been employed to the $6,500 rate.
The second example is of an unemployed parent who, according to our system and our cultural values, has to spend a lot of time looking for work. That is what we expect somebody to be doing. That person would be undermined by the same event in their life as somebody who is employed. Somebody who is employed would be affected by losing a child and the ability to get back into the job market would also be affected. That inconsistency is something I would love to see looked at in committee, especially because this would be funded from general revenue.
I forgot to mention at the beginning that, if possible, I would like to split my time with the member for Pontiac.
Here is another example of this inconsistency. Precisely why is the benefit to parents who lose a child limited to parents whose children are missing or killed only as a result of a suspected breach of the Criminal Code? Is there something quite arbitrary in drawing the line there? We all have no problem understanding the debilitating effects of crime. There is indeed something hard-wired in all human beings to perhaps react a bit worse when a crime has befallen our family; it is not just the loss of the child but how the child has been lost and I accept that distinction. Yet we can have as much trauma and debilitating effect when children go missing or are killed in other ways.
I draw on the very good speech of my colleague, the hon. member for Hamilton Mountain. In her reply speech to the minister's introduction of the bill she put it so well when she said:
If I am understanding this right, if a family were to go wilderness camping, say, and their toddler wandered away from the campsite and ended up missing, the parents would not be eligible for any support during their time of frantically searching for their child. Why is that?
She went on to say:
Did the government's need to feed the rhetoric of its law and order agenda take precedence over good public policy here? I am simply not understanding why the Criminal Code caveat was deemed necessary to add in this bill.
I echo this concern. As the minister said in the House yesterday, it is not adequate to say that it was judged to be a good public policy because of response to consultations with Canadians. Surely Canadians, upon reflection, would not begrudge extending the benefit to analogous circumstances. Are Canadians so fixated on a crime agenda that they would not see the inconsistency? I very much doubt it.
I end here because I want to hear what my colleague from Pontiac has to say after I take a few questions.