moved:
That the Eighth Report of the Standing Committee on Finance, presented on Wednesday, December 10, 2014, be concurred in.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by saying that I will be sharing my time with the excellent member for Welland.
I would like to talk about the prebudget consultations, since that is the subject of the report. I am in a good mood this morning, because yesterday we learned that the Rimouski Oceanic will be taking part in the Memorial Cup as the champions of the Quebec major junior hockey league. This will be their fourth time participating in 20 years, which is remarkable.
My good mood is a little tempered, however, by the content of the prebudget consultations. This is in no way a criticism of the chair of the Standing Committee on Finance, the member for Edmonton—Leduc, for he is doing an excellent job. I think all the parties in the House and all members of the finance committee recognize what a great job he is doing.
Although there are some interesting points in the prebudget consultation report, there are also some really troubling elements. We have no problem with some of the points, and we have supported them. Some of them even appear in budget 2015. Others, however, do pose a problem.
Until January, I was a member of the Standing Committee on Finance and had been for three years. Usually, the recommendations were a fairly accurate—though not perfect, by any means—reflection of the testimony we heard. However, the recommendations in this report, which was tabled in December 2014, make it more of a pre-election document for the existing government. Most if not all of the recommendations are from the Conservative side. Not a single NDP or Liberal amendment was accepted.
Annual prebudget consultations are an opportunity to hear from witnesses from many parts of Canadian society. Whether they are from the business sector, unions or civil society, their concerns deserve to be heard and properly reflected in the prebudget consultation report.
In this case, there are a number of problematic elements. Several recommendations in the report are nothing more than lip service. For example, recommendation 23 says that the federal government should consider new ways to increase support for the Canadian aerospace industry, but does not say how. This recommendation is akin to many of the other 47 recommendations in this report in that it says where the government wants to go but not how to get there.
That is a problem because other recommendations are more than just wishful thinking. They are blatantly a rationale for Conservative policies. In any case, the committee itself was not even able to unanimously agree on those recommendations.
When the government proposes to continue reducing tariffs, for example, it fails to mention that, overall, tariffs have gone up because it eliminated the general preferential tariff.
Prebudget consultations should be an exercise that reflects what was heard in committee, but in this case what we got seemed more like the Conservative government's shopping list to prepare for the next election. We think that is unfortunate because the Standing Committee on Finance should be the place where we can thoroughly examine all the policies that were adopted by the government. That also includes Conservative members.
A committee meeting is the only place where we can call members by name. The reason for that is that, in committee, they are not government members and they do not represent their riding. They are there to use their expertise to advise the government on what direction it should take. That is not what happened in the prebudget consultations. This time, the consultations were much more negative than previous consultations and reports.
We submitted a minority report, which is a supplementary rather than dissenting report. It is supplementary to the 47 recommendations presented by the government. There was consensus on some of those recommendations, but the two opposition parties voted against others.
One problematic issue that the government refused to address, even though it was mentioned a number of times during the consultations, is employment insurance. The report was tabled in December 2014, but at that time, we were already worried about the government using the employment insurance fund to balance its budget since we have seen that happen before. That concern is included in the NDP's supplementary report. We had no idea what the budget was going to look like, but we were worried about that happening because of what we had been hearing. This is what we wrote in our supplementary report:
The Conservatives are banking on surpluses in the EI Account in order to fund their return to budget balance—at the same time that they continue to restrict access through the implementation of their regressive EI reforms.
By “regressive reforms” we specifically mean all the measures that were adopted during the major reform of 2012. These measures have made it impossible for many Canadians to get employment insurance even though they contributed to it. Today, less than 38% of Canadians who contribute to employment insurance, who make their contributions expecting that employment insurance will help them, can get it when they lose their job. This does not make sense and, at the end of the day, it is very detrimental to regions like mine, like the Lower St. Lawrence, eastern Quebec, and eastern Canada. The economy in these regions has historically depended on seasonal employment, to a great extent, and still does. I am proud of the efforts my riding and my region have made over the past few years to diversify their economy and ensure that they are not as reliant on seasonal employment as they have been in the past. When we talk about seasonal jobs, we are talking mostly about jobs in the primary sector, the resource sector, the forestry or the fishery. We are also talking about jobs in the service sector, which for obvious reasons are only seasonal jobs, in the tourism industry for example. Going back to natural resources, there are also core industries such as agriculture. A farmer cannot harvest in winter. Maple syrup producers cannot do much of their work in the fall or winter either.
The government has failed to acknowledge this reality that affects several regions. We spoke out against this when the reform was introduced. Year after year, many witnesses have told us that the system is no longer adequate today. The EI fund has a surplus because of the increase in premiums imposed by the Conservatives. The government no longer knows what to do with it. One of the recommendations we received was to increase access to the program. The Conservatives completely ignored the recommendations. Instead they took part of the surplus and decided to give it to small and medium-sized businesses. That measure was passed last year. Small and medium-sized businesses were handed over $550 million of the employment insurance surplus with the hope of creating jobs. However, the House will remember that the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report stated that it would take over half a billion dollars to create 800 jobs, contrary to what the government was saying. Today, we find ourselves in a situation where the surplus in the EI fund, which we would like to be independent, has in large part funded the balanced budget that the federal government is boasting about.
The prebudget consultation report contains several interesting items. The work of the committee chair, the member from Edmonton—Leduc was impeccable. However, I would like to submit to the House the problems that exist in terms of the philosophy of implementing the prebudget consultations. The government is moving steadily away from taking the consultations into account and that remains a serious concern for us.
On that note, I will turn the floor over to the member for Welland, who is certainly going to continue in the same vein.