Anne-Marie Day

[Committees of the House, May 21st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for her speech. It caught my attention and raised some questions for me.

I received a letter from Joyce Reynolds of the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association. It indicates that the 15 to 24 age group has reached a demographic peak, which is contributing to the labour shortage. She says that the restaurant and food service sectors will need 1,225,200 employees between now and 2015 and that 35,000 of these positions will not be filled.

The parliamentary secretary has said that the Conservatives are going to encourage the hiring of young people to fill those positions, yet this age group has clearly already reached its demographic peak. Where will they get the workers to fill these positions?

[Committees of the House, May 21st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, in Quebec, the manpower vocational training commissions or CFPs became the SQDM, which became Emploi-Québec. In the 1990s, there was talk of a labour shortage. This is nothing new. It is a problem that the government should have dealt with a long time ago.

Now that they have recognized that there is a labour shortage, the Conservatives' reaction has been to lay responsibility for this situation on unemployed workers, reduce access to employment insurance, force Canadians to move to other parts of the country, and use the temporary foreign worker program to drive down wages.

What does the NDP propose we do to deal with this labour shortage?

[Employment Insurance, May 21st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the Social Security Tribunal is exactly where party friends are appointed.

Employment insurance is supposed to protect regional seasonal economies across Canada, but for the Conservatives, it is just a big bureaucracy where they put party friends.

The employment insurance reform could have a serious impact on employees who depend on job sharing to make a living. There is much confusion even in New Brunswick about who can be employed in the public service and who cannot.

Instead of focusing on partisan appointments, will the Conservatives work with the provinces to come up with solutions to their fiasco?

[Employment Insurance, May 9th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives have butchered the employment insurance program, and people like the mother with cancer are paying the price.

What disturbs me most is their twisted logic. When unemployed people want to claim benefits, they are asked to show proof that they have lost their jobs. However, when the Conservatives lose track of $3.1 billion, which is a rather large sum, they tell us it is not important that there are no documents.

Why treat employment insurance claimants like criminals and let ministers off easy? Why is there a double standard?

[Employment Insurance, May 8th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the minister said that they were first going to implement the reform and then assess the impact. That does not make any sense. The ministers have also said the same thing in the media. They have said that they are going to implement the reform, get it going and then see what happens.

Yesterday, clergy in the Atlantic region spoke out against this reform. Families, parents, fathers and mothers are knocking on their doors to get work. They welcome these people. They see that they do not have enough food or enough money to pay their rent and that they live too far from urban centres to follow the famous rule about accumulating a sufficient number of qualifying hours or to find a job, which the minister told them to do. Canadians are the ones who are suffering the consequences of this reform that should never have been implemented.

[Employment Insurance, May 8th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, on February 13, I asked the minister a question in the House, and the answer was reported by the media that day. In fact, thanks to the Minister of Veterans Affairs, we learned that the Conservatives' employment insurance reform was not based on any impact studies.

Naturally, I said that there were many people, including 56,836 in Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean, with unstable employment status and that workers everywhere were adversely affected by the reform.

At the time, the minister's candid response shocked me. She said that analyses of the worker shortage and the employers' need for temporary foreign workers had been done. We now see the consequences of those analyses. The government may have done studies of situations where they determined the employers' need to locate workers and bring them on site. However, they did not analyze workers' needs.

We must not forget that the driving force in our society, for a company, is the worker, not the company's needs. When we talk about the economy, we also talk about what the company needs. However, we have to match the company's needs to the worker's needs. The worker has to be taken into consideration on a regular basis.

Quebec's Minister Maltais, who is still minister, is like our Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development's counterpart. She is responsible for some status of women issues, but she is also responsible for the transfer of worker training and employment insurance matters. At the time, she tried to come to Ottawa. She did not make it because of a snowstorm.

She tried to meet with the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development a second time. However, if members remember, there was a second snowstorm. It was a problem at the time because the Minister of Human Resources had asked at the last minute to hold the meeting in the Outaouais. The entire Quebec delegation had to come to the Outaouais in the middle of a storm, and they did not have time to speak to the minister. The meeting lasted just a few minutes and they had to return because there was a vote. Therefore, they were prevented from discussing the situation.

Since then—and there were a number of articles along these lines in the newspapers—it was made clear that an impact study had not been done. It was proven. However, the minister did not change her tune.

This does not make sense to us. The study should have been done before the reform was implemented. Now, we are seeing the consequences, and we know that the Atlantic provinces oppose this reform, as does Quebec. It turns out that five of the country's 10 provinces are against this reform.

[Employment Insurance, May 6th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the Atlantic region is reeling from the Conservatives' decision to gut employment insurance. The governments of the Atlantic provinces have joined forces to condemn the consequences of this reform. Quebec is concerned about the future of industries such as fishing and tourism, which require the experienced workers who are being forced to change jobs to satisfy the minister's whims.

Instead of sounding like a broken record and saying that she wants to connect people with available jobs, could the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development make her reform connect with reality?

[Economic Action Plan 2013 Act, No. 1, May 2nd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, there is currently an originating motion to deem unconstitutional that famous manoeuvre that allowed the government to take $57 billion from the employment insurance fund, whether under Paul Martin or Mulroney. Maybe the first thing we should do is think about giving the money back to the workers.

In addition, they now continue to help themselves to $1.3 billion or so. That means that they continue to take money out of workers' and employers' pockets for the simple reason that the ceiling has been raised and the employee contribution rate has gone up by 5¢ per $100.

[Economic Action Plan 2013 Act, No. 1, May 2nd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I did not want to name Electrolux earlier, because I did not know whether it was official. Indeed, this is another company whose head office is moving to the U.S. As a result, we will lose nearly 2,000 jobs if I am not mistaken. From what we saw, absolutely nothing was done about it.

Conversely, the Conservatives will let in a company like Target, which will hire people at minimum wage. The Conservatives welcome it with open arms, even though it will mean competition in our own market.

[Economic Action Plan 2013 Act, No. 1, May 2nd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the figures I have before me clearly indicate $264 billion in revenue and $283 billion in expenditures, which means a deficit of about $19 billion.