Mr. Speaker, once again, I rise to speak to a topic that is becoming increasingly urgent as we approach the infamous EI black hole.
Protests have been mounting in recent weeks. Workers are increasingly frustrated and the minister is ignoring the thousands of people across Canada who are denouncing this reform.
She would rather play word games to try to put this issue to rest, but Canadians are not fooled. This is not a clarification of the EI rules. It is a radical reform that poorly conceals a Conservative ideology of attacking our social safety nets and the diversity of our economy. The employment insurance program does not have overall regional economic objectives. There are monthly quotas that the investigators must meet, but that is very different. The investigators did not save $500 million last year by combatting fraud. There were hundreds of millions of dollars saved because there were errors in the system, most often on the Service Canada end.
Statistics even show that less than 1% of employment insurance payments are the result of fraud. A reporting mistake made by a claimant or a Service Canada employee does not necessarily constitute fraud.
Will the minister agree to stop treating all unemployed workers like fraudsters and criminals?
This past fall, I asked the minister why she had decided to end the pilot project that provided five additional weeks of benefits and allowed seasonal workers to get through the infamous spring gap. This pilot project, which the minister herself deemed useful and effective, was used to get through the period where benefits had run out, but income from seasonal work had not yet kicked in. This measure had been in effect since 2004 in those regions of Canada with high unemployment rates. The government decided to implement it across the board as part of its action plan to deal with the most recent recession.
Canadians learned in the last budget that this measure would be eliminated altogether. But what will happen in regions where the unemployment rate is still high? In her answer to my question, the minister told Canadians that the unemployment rate had gone down enough for this measure to be withdrawn.
This pilot project was created to support regional economies that rely on seasonal employment sectors, primarily regions in eastern Canada. Let us therefore follow through on the minister's logic and look at the facts.
Between January 6 and February 9, 2013, the unemployment rate in certain regions was up to 17.3% in Newfoundland and Labrador, 11.2% in Prince Edward Island, 10.9% in western Nova Scotia, 16.2% in eastern Nova Scotia, 13% in Charlottetown, 17.6% in Restigouche, and so on. Although the Canadian unemployment rate is 7% right now, how can the minister not take into account the regional differences, the seasonal nature of work in the regions and the fact that many regions are facing a high unemployment rate, as I just described?
Does the minister believe that those rates are low enough to permanently abolish a pilot project that was helping Canadian families to get through the off-season without starving to death?