Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Windsor—Tecumseh.
I am proud to stand in the House to speak to this NDP motion, which calls on the government to urgently act on ensuring that benefits are available to help Canadians who have lost their jobs. Job losses are mounting and Canadians need immediate action on employment insurance.
Canadian workers pay for the program, but access to benefits has become harder over the years. Before the Liberals brought in austerity in the 1990s, around 80% of the unemployed received the benefits they were owed. Shortly after Liberal austerity, the EI coverage fell to less than 50% of workers who lost their jobs.
The Conservatives continued the Liberal austerity, and now we have a situation where only 39% of unemployed Canadians are receiving benefits. The Conservatives also destroyed the extended EI benefits pilot program, which was in place to help areas with very high unemployment. The program helped ensure that seasonal workers would not suffer from a gap in their EI benefits at the beginning of the employment season.
If I were an insurance sales person, and I had to sign people up on my policies and had a qualification rate of a 40% payout if something bad would happen, how well does everyone think I would do? I would have to explain to my potential clients that, yes, they would have to pay me every month out of their paycheques so if some tragedy befell them, I would help them cover it. The only problem is that less 40% of my clients would be successful at getting their claims approved. I know that I would never go to that sales person and I know that most Canadians would not either. Somehow the Conservatives thought they could do this to their people and still stay in power.
The Conservatives also made a change that allowed workers to keep 50% of their income received while working and receiving benefits. The problem with this change was the same problem the Conservatives faced while in power. This change largely benefited the wealthiest Canadians and penalized lower-income earners.
In the past, lower-income earners had the right to keep all their earnings below a certain threshold in order to help with the inequality. The NDP put pressure on the Conservatives to modify this unpopular change and they accepted and introduced a temporary measure that would have allowed those who had previously participated in the program to pick which method worked best for them on an individual basis. This is why we put the plan to allow workers to choose which formula would benefit them in our platform.
The New Democratic Party was the only political party that explicitly committed to reinstating the extended EI benefits pilot program. Of course, this does not stop us from working with the government to re-implement the program, and I know there are sympathetic ears on the government side.
I remember the press conference on Prince Edward Island, when the member for Malpeque stated that he saw the human factor from the changes first-hand, and I can certainly empathize. He said:
When you have people who come into your office two months before the work season begins and they’ve got no money and they’re wondering how are they going to put food on the table and they’re in tears—we see that human factor first hand.
I know exactly how he feels. I have said it before and will say again. I spent seven years working as a case worker to a former member of Parliament, so I have the experience of meeting people in the constituency who have had problems with employment insurance. Rookie members will have to get very used to this. Case work is a huge part of the job that MPs do. I often meet people who are 20 hours short of qualifying for employment insurance. They talk about the onerous reporting conditions they have to go through. These are emotionally charged experiences. Oftentimes families are really struggling to put food on the table. When there is an employment insurance program that only meets 39% of needs, it is simply not good enough.
We can work with the Liberal government to make this program safe and secure for Canadians who lose their jobs and have the right to the benefits. The issue for a long time was that we asked Canadians to pay into the system, but then Liberal and Conservative governments set up elaborate hoops for people to jump through, even to access the programs they funded.
In order to qualify for EI benefits, there are many different requirements and hours worked as a qualifying period, depending on the individual's circumstance and what part of the country that individual lives in. The difference in hours worked is based on the regional rate of unemployment at a given time. Why do we continue with a system that discriminates between workers who need maternity or sickness benefits and new entrants and re-entrants to the workforce? This program should be simplified.
The NDP is proposing a streamlined system in which a worker must work 360 hours in the previous year to qualify, regardless of where that worker lives in the country. The 360-hour mark was proposed by the NDP after extensive consultations with women's groups, student groups, labour unions, and anti-poverty organizations.
This upgrade to the employment insurance program would cost money from the system, but we are lucky that the EI account has a major surplus and it would be more than enough to cover this change. That is only going to be true if we put in safeguards to put a firewall around the fund. A big reason why I am going to be supporting this motion is the importance of protecting the EI fund from governments that put their political ambition before the welfare of the Canadians they represent.
For years, Liberals and Conservatives have treated the EI account like a government slush fund. As I mentioned, they slashed EI benefits and then spent the money in other ways.
When the Liberals were in power before, they took $54 billion from workers and employers who paid into the EI fund, and they spent it on various programs, such as tax cuts and giveaways to corporations with absolutely no strings attached.
The Conservatives, who were recently in power, like to tout that they had a balanced budget, which was suspect for many reasons, as we have already debated in the House. They took from the EI fund in order to call it a balanced budget.
The employment insurance fund was paid into by workers and employers to fund employment insurance, not to put up smoke and mirrors to look as if a particular political party was keeping its election promises. The Liberals are now plunging us into deficit, and we cannot allow any government in that situation to be able to steal from Canadian workers to make its numbers look rosier for the media. We can work together in the House to make sure that never happens. The 360-hour streamlined proposal could be paid for with the money that is already in there for that purpose.
The government's ability to provide real change has been worrisome over these past months, however. Job losses are happening all over the country, and bureaucratic trials are set up to keep workers from accessing desperately needed help that they are owed.
The Liberals used their first bill in the House to help give the wealthy a tax break—to some of the highest-earning Canadians, including Liberal members of Parliament. They called it a middle-class tax break when it really benefited the top 90% to 95% of earners. Anyone earning between $100,000 and $200,000 is going to get the maximum tax cut. When we look at the details, we see it really was just a public relations ploy.
Time and time again, we blasted the Conservatives, when they were in power, over their insistence on putting in programs that were designed to help the wealthiest among us. So far the Liberals have been falling into that same trap of leaving regular, working Canadians behind. The issue is that the Liberals won a mandate to put Canada in a better direction than the Conservatives did. Canadians can count on New Democrats to make positive proposals and work with the government, so we do not continue down a road where the government is only there for the elite and the privileged.
This motion, which would act on recommendations from those working in the anti-poverty sector, as well as those working for women's rights, student groups, and labour unions, would allow an equal playing field to access employment insurance benefits. It would also stop the absolutely disgraceful act of robbing the insurance fund to pay for corporate tax breaks or for a short-term image that the budget is actually balanced.
We implore Liberals to act on their promises, reverse the Conservatives' damage to our EI program, and accept our motion so that Canadians can get some immediate relief in an economy where far too many are suffering.
