Madam Speaker, it is a great pleasure to rise here to discuss an issue that I am very passionate about. As the former minister for employment, I had some occasion to work on these subjects in the past.
Today, I would like to address the motion before the House of Commons to bring in a 45-day work year in Canada. Let me unpackage how we come to that 45-day or two-month period people would be required to work under the proposed changes the NDP has put before the House.
The NDP has suggested that we should lower the entrance requirement or qualifying period to 365 hours for Canadians right across the country, regardless of the labour market in which they find themselves. Three hundred and sixty-five hours in qualifying time based on a 40-hour work week equals about nine weeks, or two months. In other words, under the proposal before the House right now, people would work for two months and then collect employment insurance for 10 months. That would be available in every region of the country, regardless of the unemployment rate. In other words, even in places where there are labour shortages and employers are having difficulty recruiting workers, we would be paying people not to work.
The result of this would be an increase in the costs of the employment insurance program. That would be evident by virtue of the fact that in order to fund the additional benefits under this proposal and to compensate for the fact that fewer people would be working because more people would be on EI, the government would have to increase premiums. All the benefits paid out from employment insurance come from the premiums paid by employers and employees.
The estimates for the cost of going to a 45-day work year or two-month work year range from about $1.5 billion to $4 billion a year. As we can imagine, all of that burden would need to fall onto the shoulders of taxpayers, both workers and the businesses that employ them, through increased premiums. If we increase the employment insurance premiums, we make it more expensive to hire and thus discourage hiring. We would be punishing people for the work they do, particularly low-income workers, because employment insurance premiums are a regressive tax. They do not increase in percentage terms based on the income people take. This would be a very regressive tax increase that would disproportionately target small businesses and low-income workers and would detract from the government's stated goal to help the middle-class and those who “want to join it”.
Furthermore, it would impose new burdens on the Canadian workforce. Imagine if in every place in the country there were large numbers of people who worked only two months out of a year and then used the employment insurance system for the remaining 10 months. What would that mean for our workforce? I will let the House use its imagination. I suggest that instead of taxing people who work and the people who hire them in order to pay people not to work, we should encourage job creation. I have some practical suggestions for the government and the NDP on that score.
First, we have a growing surplus in the employment insurance account and the NDP is quite right in suggesting that that money does not belong to the government. I propose that we use it to cut employment insurance payroll taxes by 21%. That reduction in taxes was laid out in last year's budget. It is booked as part of the fiscal framework and it can be afforded based on the surplus that had been growing in the employment insurance fund when the Conservative government left office. That would make it less expensive for employers to hire and it would reward workers by letting them keep more of what they earn.
Second, we need to continue to re-profile our training program. For too long we trained people in this country for jobs that did not exist.
I was able to work with the previous government in order to re-engineer some of those training programs to connect people with available jobs. We worked on a labour market development agreement that was signed by British Columbia and Saskatchewan. Other provinces supported the agreement. That would have seen the employment insurance training dollars, of which there are about $2 billion a year, directed toward connecting people with jobs that actually existed. When they go into a provincial or territorial employment office, their training is not funded until there is an employer with which they are matched up.
Instead of having people coming in and saying that they would like to study accounting and having training dollars immediately available, the employment worker at the job training centre would check the local hiring registry and ascertain if someone is hiring accountants in that area. Employment workers do not want to send people to training programs until they know it will result in a job. By involving employers at the front end and ensuring that the unemployed train up for an available opening, then we increase the success rate.
We created something called the job bank over the years. That job bank is available to help people ascertain what openings are available. Now the goal should be to match the employer seeking the employee with someone who is unemployed, and to use EI training funds to bridge the gap between the two. The money is already there. We just need to deploy it in a more targeted and precise fashion.
In addition to training, though, which is great for developing credentials, we need to do a better job of recognizing credentials. That is the case in the professions, mostly for newcomers, but also in the trades.
When I was in British Columbia meeting with business leaders, I met several very well-trained tradesmen who had been in the workforce for 20 or 30 years as welders and an electrician, but who had never received a Red Seal ticket or any occupational designation to go along with their work because their work had always been informal. Those types of people have difficulty moving between provinces and opportunities because they do not have their ticket, even though they are equally skilled as the many people who do.
One of the things on which the government should work with the provinces is to quickly recognize the credentials of long-tenured tradespeople who have not done formal apprenticeships and therefore have not received their formal ticket. That would allow them to get a certification that would permit them to move between provinces.
We need to complete the work of apprenticeship mobility. The Atlantic provinces signed an agreement that allowed their apprentices to move around the region in the middle of their apprenticeship program. However, because apprenticeships vary, even within occupations, from province to province, oftentimes a third year apprentice pipefitter, for example, who might have been working in Alberta under an employer, under a journeyman or woman there, but has lost their job because of the downturn, cannot then pick up and move to a new opportunity that might have opened up in, say, Ontario, because the apprenticeship systems in the two provinces are different. We need to do across Canada what the Atlantic provinces have done out east, which is to try to harmonize completely the apprenticeship program.
We have done so for ticketed tradespeople. In other words, under chapter 7 on the internal agreement on trade, a trades person with a ticket in one province is recognized in all provinces, and that is also the case for most professions. If individuals get themselves certified in, say, Alberta, but then they need a new job in another province, they can use their certification there. We need to finish that work for apprentices now that it has largely been done for journey people.
Finally, we need to streamline the process for recognizing the credentials of newcomers, particularly professionals from abroad.
We have an enormous number of foreign trained professionals who come to our country. If we could get them licensed to practise more quickly in their field, they would fill important needs in our workforce at very low cost to Canadian taxpayers, and it would allow them to fulfill their extraordinary potential when they get to our country.