Mr. Speaker, never have I been happier than I am today to have microphones in the House of Commons to carry my voice, because there was no way that I was going to stay silent on an issue as important as standing up for workers. In case my voice gives out, I would like to say right away that I will be sharing my time with the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue.
During the 41st Parliament, I was lucky enough to be our employment insurance critic and to learn from one of the greatest defenders of EI and workers' rights of all time, the former member for Acadie—Bathurst, Yvon Godin, whom I salute in passing and whom I thank for sharing his passion and above all his knowledge with me for so many years.
The issue before us this morning is extremely important. It is based on three main pillars, which have been neglected by both the Liberals and Conservatives in recent years.
This is evidenced by the fact that every time the EI system has been reformed since its creation, the same two things have happened: it has become harder for people to access the system and the benefit amount has been reduced.
We are talking about employment insurance. It is an insurance plan. That says it all. People contribute to it in order to draw benefits when they need them. In an insurance policy, the criteria are specific and well established.
Imagine if after choosing life insurance, car insurance, or property insurance, we were told how much it would cost and then we were told that there was a 64% chance that we would not be covered when the time came to make a claim. We would probably look for another insurance provider as quickly as possible.
The problem is that when it comes to employment insurance, there is only one plan in Canada, and the employers and employees who contribute to it and keep it going are the least entitled to it.
Oddly, since the beginning of this debate, we have heard all sorts of misleading statements about how the former Conservative government rescued the employment insurance plan by injecting $9 billion into it, but paid itself back afterward. The Conservatives put $9 billion into the plan because they had taken $52 billion out of it. If we take 52 and we subtract nine, then we can see that the plan absolutely had the means to be self-financing. That is the key to the plan.
I would like to recognize another former colleague, Robert Chilsom, who introduced a bill in the 41st Parliament to protect premiums paid by employers and employees into the employment insurance fund and to ensure that every single dollar paid into this fund is used only for the purposes stated in the Employment Insurance Act.
We know that a Supreme Court ruling more or less legalized the misappropriation and use of money from the employment insurance fund by a former Liberal government. Just because something is legal does not make it legitimate. That is why the NDP has been fighting for months and years to protect the fund. No government, regardless of its political stripe, can use this fund for anything other than to support workers.
I will now move on to the second most important point. Oddly enough, when I was the critic, there was a lot of talk about unemployment in Quebec and the Maritimes, whereas the economy was in high gear in western Canada, especially Alberta. I always maintained that it was an insurance program.
I hope that everyone has the good fortune of paying for insurance their whole life and never needing to collect a cent. However, insurance is insurance, and when disaster strikes we have to be able to do something about it.
Now disaster has struck in Alberta and the workers in that province are in exactly the same situation as all the workers in eastern Canada, Quebec, and Ontario, some of whom had to face this type of stress long before them.
The threshold of 360 hours is just the beginning. There is no reason in the world why the stress level of a person who loses a job would differ from one region to another, because job loss is one of the most stressful things that can happen in life. Health insurance would not be offered differentially from one region to another because the rate of health or illness is different. That is absurd. When people get sick, they need health insurance and they get the services they need. When people lose their jobs, they need employment insurance, and if they paid into it, they should have access to it at a set threshold of 360 hours.
For a while now, I have been hearing the same rather short-sighted reasoning from our Conservative friends who are going on and on about how people will only have to work two months to be eligible for EI, as though workers might make a way of life out of doing that. However, for people who work odd hours or who are in a precarious situation with fewer hours of work per week, it does not take two months to accumulate 360 hours of work. It may take six or eight months.
Take for example the closure of all the Target stores in Quebec just a few months ago. Most of the employees who worked there every week were ineligible for employment insurance benefits. Three hundred and sixty hours is not two months of work. It may be many months of work for those who are less wealthy and who really need this little boost.
It is also important to note that employment insurance is commensurate with income. People who work in precarious, part-time jobs earn a lot less than people who work 40 hours a week, as our Conservative friends calculated. It is completely unfair and out of touch with reality to paint these workers as people who only want to work two months out of the year and live off EI the rest of the time. That is completely ridiculous.
The last important point I wanted to make, since I said I had three points, has to do with the vile consequences of the Conservative reform, and yes, I mean vile. Unfortunately, I have too much to say and not enough time, but let us talk about the notion of suitable employment.
We have already heard a former finance minister in this House say that suitable employment is whatever job one can get. Let us imagine for example a teacher with a university education who has developed a particular expertise. In the first few years of his career, as is often the case, he gets laid off at the end of the school year, because there is no guarantee that there will be enough students the next year to guarantee him a job. If this worker were asked to go and pick strawberries, he would have to prove that he is incapable of picking strawberries. I do not know too many people who would not be able to pick strawberries, so that would be considered suitable employment.
It is completely ridiculous to suggest that a teacher, who has developed an expertise and special skill that society needs, will be deprived of his professional work only to be sent to do a job that he never intended to do. That is not the kind of contribution he wants to make to society. Worse still, because the teacher is taking that job in order to fill the gap months, when the time comes to leave the strawberry patch and return to teaching, if he is offered a contract, his departure will be identified as being voluntary and he will not be eligible for EI, should he lose his teaching job. This is the world upside down. There are many details like this that just do not make sense.
I need to stop getting worked up, even though I could go on and on about other topics. However, I am ready to take questions.