Paul Crête

[Unemployment Insurance Reform, April 18th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the Council of the regional county municipalities of Rivière-du-Loup, Témiscouata, Kamouraska, Des Basques, Rimouski-Neigette, Matane, Pabos, Côte-de-Gaspé and Bonaventure have all sent a request to the federal government, asking for nothing less than the withdrawal of the bill concerning the unemployment insurance reform.

The RCMs point out the negative impact the reform proposed by the Minister of Human Resources Development will have. They are referring to the measures affecting seasonal workers. They think that the rules restricting the workers' eligibility or requesting 910 hours to become eligible to UI benefits for the first time will only help to promote the underground economy.

These people are not professional agitators, as the minister has suggested, but rather the mayors of these various regional county municipalities, speaking on behalf of the people who elected them.

I think that the minister should realize that the regions affected by the reform will not accept token changes. The government will have to go back to the drawing board.

[Department Of Human Resources Development Act, April 18th, 1996]

I thank my hon. colleague for her question, Mr. Speaker.

It is important to realize that the unemployment insurance reform was developed and put forth by the Department of Human Resources Development, the very department to be established through the bill before us.

As for how this reform will penalize women and young people, first of all, by requiring people to work 910 hours, or 26 thirty-five hour weeks, to qualify, it will automatically condemn many young people to pay into the unemplyment insurance fund without drawing any benefit from it, which will encourage them to go underground. That defies comprehension.

There are also tighter requirements affecting women. The Fédération des femmes du Québec felt that the bill, as it stands, even closes the door on maternity leave. Incidentally, the government has yet to move an amendment to remedy this situation.

As women hold down the most precarious jobs on the market, they are the first victims of the current wave of restraints. Increasing the hours of work required to qualify will unavoidably force them back onto unemployment insurance and welfare faster, since they will have been unable to accumulate enough hours.

So, before tightening unemployment insurance requirements like this bill does, the government should have put programs in place to really give people a chance to find a job. Young people, women and all the others do want to work and to develop, but this reform is certainly no help, quite the contrary.

[Department Of Human Resources Development Act, April 18th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I think it is indeed the wrong approach to oppose unemployment and deficit as if both could not be fought at the same time. For example, if the federal government had really decided to thoroughly review its spending in various areas, it could have reduced the deficit without also having to generate a UI fund surplus that is somewhat artificial and designed to make the federal government look good. The government can then brag about reducing its deficit. This money, however, is not being used productively but merely collected in this fund.

There may be a reserve fund-the amount is now pegged at $5 billion for this year. There is a need to put this money back into circulation. One approach would be to make premiums low enough so that employers and employees can have money in their pockets allowing them to consume and thus stimulate the economy. And by reducing their costs, employers would be able to develop their businesses and create more jobs.

We are going through a very particular situation in which economic growth does not necessarily lead to job creation.

In this regard, we should perhaps start as we did with the deficit by setting clear objectives. We could set a target employment rate for January 1, 1998 and plan departmental actions accordingly. It is not a matter of creating artificial jobs, but of making sure that every departmental employee will be concerned about maximizing human potential.

When the government goes before the electorate two or three years from now, it should be judged on how it helped people to work, to develop their potential; we would then have a clear, objective criterion. As far as the employment issue is concerned, this government can be criticized for never making clear commitments and being lulled by an economic growth that never led to additional jobs.

Proposals should be put forward with respect to the reduction of overtime or to work sharing. Even the UI reform has some perverse effects in this regard. Reducing the maximum wage on which premiums are paid encourages large corporations with highly paid staff to raise their salaries and increase overtime a little, with the net result that they hire fewer people.

There is much thinking to be done in this regard, but we must act quickly. This will not be done by creating a department such as the new Department of Human Resources Development.

[Department Of Human Resources Development Act, April 18th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on this bill, but at the same time somewhat troubled to have to do so, for it has been said almost ad nauseam already that the federal government's decision to create the Department of Human Resources is evidence of its disdain toward Quebec and the provinces in general. This is just one more piece of the puzzle, along with unemployment insurance reform and the Canada social transfer, to allow the federal government to continue to be involved, and to step up its involvement, in training and education.

In fact, the Department of Human Resources Development is a sort of embryonic Canadian ministry of education. It is as if the government had learned nothing from the past. Again and again, it has been said that the government no longer had the means to intervene in areas that were outside its jurisdiction, that it ought to learn to stick to what was within its jurisdiction, but the lesson has not been heeded. Once again, the creation of the department of resource development represents involvement in an area in which the federal government has never been very efficient.

In fact, using legislation to create a department is legalizing behaviour that was already there under the previous Conservative government and has been carried on by the Liberals, but now it is made official, made legal by a law. It is quite simply stated: "The federal government can decide to sign training agreements with the provinces, with groups, with individuals" without necessarily having to respect the priorities a province has defined.

With this type of analysis, people can easily think that this is a matter of sovereignists versus federalists, but I would like there to be a concrete examination of what it means and what its impacts will be.

Take the following case for instance. The Government of Quebec is presently developing an active employment policy. The minister responsible in Quebec asked each region in Quebec to examine existing programs at the provincial level aimed at helping people to find jobs, improving their employability and identifying target

groups in need of special support. These consultations are going on in every region.

At the same time, by creating the Department of Human Resources Development, the federal government gets the power to sign an agreement in a particular region in Quebec or elsewhere in Canada that could easily go against the conclusions which will come out of the ongoing consultations, in Quebec, on the establishment of a regional employment policy.

Such things have occurred on a regular basis in the past. For example, we have seen the federal government giving contracts for training projects in areas where people had already been trained under other regular training programs. Those people were getting training which is not recognized by the Quebec Department of Education in areas such as mechanics, office automation or electronic data processing and which did not necessarily follow the same curriculum as those defined by the Quebec government.

The end result was that instead of having 15 trained people available for that type of job, their were 25, 30 or 35 of them and this led to a result opposite to the one expected: Instead of being placed for jobs, people were faced with undue competition and some had to go elsewhere to find work. Therefore training, which was aimed at allowing people to remain in their own region, did not reach its objective.

In the past, the frequency of this sort of happening was often lessened through the good relations that developed between federal and provincial officials in each of the communities. However, that did not prevent $250 million from being wasted in Quebec alone because of duplication of jurisdictions. Passing legislation establishing the Department of Human Resources Development will make this sort of duplication official. So, unless Quebec simply abandons its field of jurisdiction to the federal government, we will continue to have the useless expenditures and the perpetual duplication of the past. This is quite out of the question and beyond the means of our country.

There are needs. As the OECD has said, we in Canada spend a lot on training. The problem is that we do not spend wisely. We spend a lot on parallel bureaucracies, we no longer necessarily have the means to pay for duplicate bureaucracies, and we can no longer afford our inefficiency.

The actions of the federal government continue to roll along, like a steam roller, as if there had been no referendum. In fact the sovereignists lost the referendum by a hair, but the message was very clear and where the message sounds its clearest is in the area of manpower. This message was repeated at the Quebec City socio-economic summit. It was expressed by the Conseil du patronat du Québec, which even repeated it this week to the Standing Committee on Human Resources, saying that it is time the Canada employment centres came under Quebec's sole jurisdiction, so that concerted action may be taken and dynamic regional employment policies put in place to avoid having those on welfare shifted to unemployment and the unemployed shifted to welfare.

Why is the federal government insisting on intervening in this sector? Understandably, for the rest of Canada, outside Quebec, there may be a role for a department responsible for training. I have heard this already, for instance when the Standing Committee on Human Resources was touring the country, from a university chancellor who said: "If the Canadian training system is to be effective we must have national standards. The system must be highly operational. We must know precisely where we are going and have training objectives".

In Quebec, we have never claimed that this was impossible in the rest of Canada if the provinces and the federal government agreed. However, we need to have the required autonomy to act in keeping with our labour situation. The situation in Quebec is very different.

For example, we often hear talk in the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development about manpower mobility. People say that if we had, across the board, an unemployment insurance plan which required the same number of weeks everywhere, there would be a natural movement of people who would go where the jobs are and therefore there would be a more natural balance than with the present legislation.

Of course, this disregards the fact that people have acquired the taste, the habit and the will to work in certain regions, and to live there with their families, because they like it there. Moreover, this argument in Quebec becomes crucial if the system were to be applied uniformly as the Department of Human Resources Development-that steam roller which is a creature of the federal government-would like. The Department of Human Resources Development wants to ask people to move to find work. This will not only lead to diluting the French fact concentrated in Quebec, it will also have a negative impact on the very social fabric of Quebec, and on the fact that Quebecers are a people anxious to see to their own development.

We must realize that the creation of this kind of department is based to a certain extent on the federal government's decision to have a uniform and very neutral development tool that can be used across Canada. This is the kind of tool that did not work during the last 20 or 25 years. It did not produce anything. It did not yield the expected results, but the government persists in trying to make it work.

The present government members were not elected 15 years ago but at the same time as any one of us, that is two and a half years

ago. I hope they came here with the idea of controlling the bureaucracy instead of being under its control. Why are they bringing us back to the old ways? They decided they would listen to the deputy ministers, to the senior public servants, and try once again to impose solutions instead of allowing people to make their own decisions, determine their directions and make the necessary choices locally.

The creation of the Department of Human Resources Development is a clear demonstration of this. In the end, the federal government is going over the provinces' heads. Let me give the House an example.

Clause 7 of the bill reads: "the Department may, with the approval of the Governor in Council, enter into agreements with a province or group of provinces for the purpose of facilitating the formulation, coordination and implementation of unemployment insurance, employment and immigration programs".

However, the other clause allows the same thing to be done directly with groups and organizations, and this causes the problems I explained earlier that all of us are experiencing in our ridings. Funds were given by the federal government for specific type of training, but that training was not necessarily in line with the priorities set by the Société québécoise de la main-d'oeuvre for that particular area.

At times, consultations at the local level prevent problems, but at other times, there are situations where the training being provided is in direct conflict with what Quebec is offering.

Six months after the referendum, in this area as in the other sectors, after the Prime Minister decided to forget about the distinct society issue, it is business as usual in the House. The steam roller is going full speed ahead. The government is fully committed to creating the human resources development department, which will legitimize the federal government's interference in areas which had never come under its jurisdiction.

The fact that Quebec sovereignists are not the only ones to condemn this decision should get the federal government to think twice about it. The Société québécoise de la main-d'oeuvre passed several unanimous resolutions denouncing this bill. There has been statements to the effect that in Quebec the consensus is to have this whole area under Quebec jurisdiction.

In Quebec there are diehard federalists who are part of this consensus; a case in point is the head of the Conseil du patronat du Québec, who cannot be accused of being a sovereignist, or pro-independence. He himself has asked the Minister of Human Resources Development to look closely into the matter and to realize that the best thing the federal government could do regarding this issue would be to withdraw from this area.

Today, we are in the final stage of the bill. You will recall that it was introduced during the previous session and should have died on the Order Paper , but was revived in the new session.

Despite the fact that there has been a new Throne Speech, that we have the referendum results, that we now know what kind of changes Quebecers want, that there is unanimous agreement in Quebec on what should be done with regard to the manpower training issue, the federal government remains deaf or chooses to ignore the issue.

It goes ahead with the bill in order to interfere in several areas which do not come under its jurisdiction. I predict that, in a few years, we will see the federal government being judged by the Auditor General or by the population for the inefficiency of this department's spending on training.

We have examples of this in cases where the federal government decided to take action, like the strategy it adopted to fight unemployment in the Maritimes fishing industry or its approach to the problem of discrepancy between the workers available on the labour market and the jobs offered. Why is it that in x number of years, the government has not succeeded in solving that problem, it has not found a way to train the unemployed so that they can take on the available jobs? All this is the result of the current system, and they want to officialize that system by creating the Department of Human Resources Development.

They lack imagination, initiative and receptiveness to what people are saying about the kind of system they want and about their need to know that decisions will be made at a local level and within the context of governmental choices.

Within the Canadian system, there is a provincial government which has chosen to say: "Employment will be our priority. We will do all we can to optimize the potential of our people". But the federal government leans the other way; I am not using that example to say one attitude is better than the other, but the federal government chooses a completely different approach, as we can see now with the Unemployment Insurance Act, where it is said that people who regularly receive unemployment benefits do so voluntarily and exploit the system. They are made to appear to be abusing the system.

The federal government approaches the area of unemployment, the area of manpower mobility, in a way which is completely different from that of the provincial government. As long as both levels of government can intervene in the same area of jurisdiction there will be inefficiencies. Measures taken by one cancel out measures taken by the other.

This is not good and, in the end, it is always at the expense of the taxpayer. Although the money in the unemployment insurance fund comes from employers and employees, nobody denies that the government has some responsibility to make sure that the money is used adequately, that it is used for the intended purpose. There is no excuse for not opting for the right way to do things, for not delegating to Quebec all the active measures regarding employment, so that Quebec may have full jurisdiction and be able to harmonize them with all its other economic actions.

You cannot operate in isolation. You cannot have a certain approach to economic action and another one to employment. This is inconceivable. This, however, is more less the result of the mess we are now in with regard to the use of our human potential. We launched into a race for productivity without expanding the necessary effort to make sure that those who get trampled in this race, those who are pushed out of the labour force, have other opportunities to find employment.

Unfortunately, the bill on the table today for the creation of the Department of Human Resources Development will never have the efficiency, the reaction speed required to be able to respond quickly to the new requirements of the labour market. In order to do that the action has to be decentralized, it has to be geared to very local priorities and it has to fit a single government orientation.

At the present time we do not find that in Canada and the victims of that situation are the young people entering the labour force and the older workers in their fifties who lose their jobs and cannot find any alternatives.

For all these reasons, I think it is important that the government reflects once more on this bill before passing it and that the citizens realize that this bill creating the Department of Human Resources Development will be much more useful to the federal upper bureaucracy than to the people it is supposed to serve, that is all the citizens who need an efficient, viable and reasonably priced service.

[The Budget, April 16th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, to respond briefly, I would say that hope must be kept alive. It is not true that there can be no future; we must take the future into our own hands and do something with it.

I think that if the government was really serious about developing the regions of Quebec and Canada while reforming unemployment insurance, it would have implemented economic diversification policies so that we do not end up in the same situation as the Institut Maurice-Lamontagne in Sainte-Flavie, which is cutting jobs in research and development as UI standards are being tightened. This is an unacceptable contradiction. This is a message of hopelessness for young people.

A message of hope would be to tell everyone they are committed, to share their hopes for the future with their political representatives, and to elect governments that will make choices and give priority to job creation so that they can be proud of their future professional achievements.

[The Budget, April 16th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the debate on the budget, which is now coming to an end. For years we have been told about the need to control the federal debt, about the fact that this huge debt would require a decentralizing process, about the fact that while federal politicians did not have the political will to do it they would have no choice because of budget constraints. Yet, this is not happening.

Why? First, because the federal government has found another scheme to continue to get involved in fields of provincial jurisdiction and to spend like it did before. I am referring to the UI fund. The government has made hostages of employers and workers. First, it makes them contribute to the fund and then it uses the UI surplus to continue to get involved in manpower training and to set up programs in various social areas which come under provincial jurisdiction.

In a way, this is a variation of what the Trudeau government did for years, when it borrowed on foreign markets to preserve its artificial Canadian dream. Now that it can no longer rely on international lenders because our indebtedness has reached an unacceptable level, the government has found another way of doing the same thing by using the UI fund.

The current situation is highly unusual in that there is a big surplus in the UI fund, but the government will still target seasonal workers, those who rely on UI benefits every year, not because they are bad workers, but simply because they work in industries which cannot operate throughout the year and because there are no other jobs available for them during the winter months. These people are like hostages. Moreover, they are low and middle-income workers who will still have to do more to help reduce the deficit, since the government decided to lower the level of UI contributions of high-income earners.

This is very surprising on the part of a Liberal government. It seems as though the Liberals have given up their social democratic principles of the seventies in favour of the ideas of the Conservatives and the Reformers, something they should not be proud of.

There are also some fairly amazing examples of federal intervention. While claiming there is no money the government created a health research fund with tens of millions of dollars available in a sector that comes under provincial jurisdiction. That is set out clearly in the Constitution. The provinces have developed expertise in this field, and the federal government takes it upon itself to create a health research fund, after having created the national forum on health, which will be providing us with findings that are out of step with the every day reality, with what is experienced every week by the bodies responsible for health services in each of the provinces, where concrete front line solutions must be found.

When all is said and done, it is always the same taxpayer who will pay for the national forum on health, who will pay for the health research fund, the same one who will pay for health services in Quebec and in the other provinces. The taxpayer may well ask why duplicate administrations are necessary. Can we still afford such a thing?

Another example is the desire to create a federal securities commission. Here again, there are provincial securities commissions in place. They have proven themselves and all that is needed is for them to be linked up, but a superstructure such as the federal government wishes to put into place is not necessary on top of that. It just means more administrative costs.

The government would have shown good will if it had said "In this area at least we have not been involved in the past, so we will not go putting our big feet into it, adding to the debt and the tax burden of Quebecers and Canadians".

In this budget, there is no desire on the part of the federal government to cut back on its lifestyle. The key point I feel must be made is that this budget contains no initiative for solving the main problem of Quebec and Canada. If you survey people today and ask what the main problem in our economy is, they will answer "employment".

Employment, and the fact that the full potential of our people, in Quebec and in Canada, their potential and abilities, are not being made use of. We have to keep doing so. Fantastic technologies have been put in place, which cast aside people who had the skills and the ability to do things.

There are people who were working in forest management, who, in the past, would cut timber. What are we doing with them? Are we casting them aside? With the increased productivity machinery affords us, we decided to forget about these people all over the place and not make proper use of them.

This is what is happening with young people as well. The budget contains rather distressing measures, such as the reduction in the amount people can contribute to labour sponsored venture capital corporations or to the new CSN fund. These programs were put in place a few years ago, a decade ago. They created jobs; they maintained some; they allowed unions to put money into businesses, to better understand how the business worked and therefore to more easily help with management and avoid confrontational labour relations.

The government has decided to reduce the amount people can contribute to these funds. At the same time the surplus in the unemployment insurance fund is being increased. In other words, money is being taken from productive funds and put into more bureaucratic funds, which are not very effective. There is still time for the government to act to avoid such a mistake, which will have a disastrous effect on employment.

The budget contains another disappointment in the area of employment and that is, as regards a review of taxation, the only thing this government has chosen to do is set up a technical committee. They decided to put off by at least one year the decisions that will have to be made, when it has been already two years since they came to power and when people from all levels of society have clearly expressed their concerns in this regard. We must find ways to use the human potential available to us.

We have nothing against businesses making big profits, but we must ensure that the productivity gain serves not only to accumulate money but also to use people's potential. The government must ensure that, when compared to other societies in North America, in Europe or elsewhere in the world, Quebec and Canada are seen as really using the potential of their people. We did not only give a chance to the stronger ones to make money and to succeed. We managed to put everyone's potential to good use.

The handicapped must be able to maximize their capacity to work. Young people entering the labour force for the first time must have had a chance to maximize their potential, in order to avoid the present situation, where a lot of people with technical and professional training and even people with university degrees just waste their potential over years. At some point, it is as if they were no longer in the labour force. Then, it is much harder to have them re-enter the labour force.

I think the government should have made a special effort on that front, but it did not do so.

We are often told that the opposition does not suggest any solutions. On that matter, there were some. The government ought to have mentioned a specific goal in the speech from the throne or in the budget. Just like it did in matters of deficit control, it should have set a job creation goal by stating: "The goal is such and such a level. In one year or two we will have reached that goal and, thanks to our political commitment, we will have chosen to really develop people's potential".

It could be done also through specific tax measures that would benefit employment. A business cutting jobs because of new technologies should not only reap advantages in terms of tax exemptions but should also be made to bear some costs because it is sending to the unemployment lines employees who previously had a job. We must find ways to do that. These are not things that will come about by the interactions of various market forces. The government has a regulatory role to play, and I think it resides in actions of this type.

We could also have implemented an action plan for all departments. Imagine if the Prime Minister had said: "For 1996-97, the goal is to reduce the unemployment rate. Each department will have its own objective in that area and will have to report on its performance one year from now, just as we did for the deficit". The public would have been happier at the end of the year. We would have put to good use the potential of a whole generation and kindled hope in young people who would have been encouraged to start a family, have children and perpetuate our society.

The 1996 budget could have been the means to such an end. But that is not the case and that is why we will vote against it.

[Petitions, March 29th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I want to present a petition signed by more than 200 people who criticize the inequity of the new Canada-U.S. tax treaty on American pensions paid to Canadian residents.

The petitioners call on the Canadian government to deal with this problem either by changing the way these pensions are taxed by the Americans or, if that is not possible, by finding a way of making sure these people are not penalized by the new tax treaty signed by Canada.

[Canada Post Corporation Act, March 29th, 1996]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-259, an act to amend the Canada Post Corporation Act (membership of Board of Directors).

Mr. Speaker, the objective of this bill is to ensure that the board of directors of the Canada Post Corporation includes representatives from each and every province in Canada so that there is a balance and the specific character of each region can be respected, and to set up committees so that, when decisions are made at the regional level, the people from the regions affected are consulted to ensure that the economic impact of those decisions on regional development is taken into account by Canada Post Corporation.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed.)

[Public Harbours And Port Facilities Act, March 29th, 1996]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-258, an act to amend the Public Harbours and Port Facilities Act.

Mr. Speaker, this bill, which had been introduced during the previous session, would insure more fairness in the appointment of harbour masters. In the present legislation, there is an old practice harking back to early Confederation days that lends itself to a lot of political patronage.

The purpose of the bill is to make sure that appointments are made as a result of a selection process based on merit.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed.)

[Unemployment Insurance Act, March 29th, 1996]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-257, an act to amend the Unemployment Insurance Act.

Mr. Speaker, this bill would change certain functions with regard to insurability of UI claimants. At present, there is a very serious backlog of files to be reviewed in terms of insurability. The purpose of the bill is to decentralize administration to the employment centres to make sure the backlog problem is resolved.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed.)