Madam Speaker, the Social Security Tribunal of Canada is a real disaster. We waited months for the KPMG report, and it is damning. Every case referred to the tribunal, which the Conservatives created in 2013 for the stated purpose of saving $25 million per year, has ended up costing more than under the old board of referees system, not to mention taking longer. It costs close to $2,400 now, compared to $720 before.
The Conservatives claimed their system would be more efficient, but the tribunal has a backlog of cases. Simply put, the tribunal takes five times longer to handle cases than the old system did. I would like to congratulate the FTQ, the CSN, and the Mouvement autonome et solidaire des sans-emploi, MASSE, for their amazing work on this file. Wait times for employment insurance appeals have gotten longer and longer ever since the tribunal was set up. It was 109 days by the end of the first year, and it is now 219 days. Imagine waiting nearly a year for an appeal.
The status quo is no longer tenable. It is time for the government to keep its word and reform the Social Security Tribunal, as it promised to do.
Speaking of promises, the office of the minister responsible for social development has admitted that the tribunal is inefficient, saying that the backlog has been growing since 2013, and Canadians are waiting. His staff also said that the tribunal's decisions have an impact on people's lives and that it is important to restructure the tribunal to make it more efficient and more productive, so that people get decisions within a reasonable time frame.
As for the Prime Minister, he promised to “create new performance standards for services offered by the federal government” by reforming the appeals process at the SST so that Canadians receive “timely access to needed services”.
Nearly two and a half years later, however, we are still waiting for the promised changes. I would therefore like to know why the government is not doing more on this issue.
In 2013, the Conservative government made the mistake of ignoring warnings from my colleagues, unemployed workers' groups, and unions and carried out this reform without doing any consultations.
As Gaétan Cousineau, the coordinator of Mouvement Action-Chômage de la Gaspésie, has said, many people get discouraged and decide not to appeal due to the backlogs, whereas under the old system, appeals used to be made in person, in our regions, before boards of referees. Representatives of Mouvement Action Chômage de Saint-Hyacinthe have made similar comments.
I will therefore ask my question in clear terms. When will the Liberals finally decide to take action and get rid of the Social Security Tribunal once and for all? I am asking this question on behalf of all the unemployed workers who, as I said, may have to wait almost a year for their appeals to be heard.