Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have taken so much money from the employment insurance fund in the past that we are no longer able to provide benefits to workers all year round. In order to make up for the lack of money and competence, the Liberals brought in pilot projects in an attempt to cover the black hole that appears in the spring.
The Conservatives are now eliminating this vital program. Additional weeks of employment insurance benefits are designed to help seasonal workers make ends meet before the work season starts. Otherwise, they end up in a black hole of several weeks without income.
The pilot project must continue. It is shameful for a government to leave thousands of workers in poverty. It is even more shameful on the part of the Conservatives because they have not learned from past mistakes when the Liberals tried to bring in EI reforms in the 1990s.
In the long term, we need a real reform that will actually meet the needs of workers. After all, employment insurance belongs to the workers and to employers. It is time to stop taking away what is rightfully theirs.
The minister must understand that her reform is having direct, serious consequences on thousands of workers and employers. She would know this if she had asked for impact studies before pushing ahead with a reform that is so out of touch with reality. However, the minister refuses to listen.
When representatives of the entire eastern Quebec region went to her to explain how her reform will affect them, she called the evidence given by representatives of the Coalition de l'Est myths. As they say, there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.
The employment insurance reform is having serious consequences, but the minister continues to call those consequences myths. It is not a myth when thousands of people are all saying that this reform is hurting them.
However, what is a myth is the minister's assertion that inspectors do not have a quota, when we now know that they are all supposed to cut nearly $500,000 each in benefits per year. The minister should be able to distinguish something that is a myth from something that is not.
Clearly, real studies and real consultations are needed before any reforms are made to something as important as employment insurance. However, the minister recently admitted that no impact studies were conducted. She said simply that some analyses were done, but we know nothing about those analyses. We cannot be sure of anything in terms of what those analyses were based on. Once again, the government is working in the dark.
How can such major changes be made without any studies? Will the minister make those analyses public, so we can see what she based her reform on?