Chris Charlton

[Employment Insurance, June 11th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative record for workers is abysmal, attacking seasonal workers, temporary foreign workers and construction workers, and the worst is yet to come. The Conservatives' omnibus budget bill would give the minister carte blanche to make unilateral changes to employment insurance. If we cannot even trust the Conservatives with public legislation, how on earth can we trust them behind closed doors?

[Petitions, June 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to table a petition today that is signed by hundreds of people from across Canada.

The petitioners are concerned about the lack of accessible and affordable child care. They want to know that their children are getting care of the highest quality and they want the government to know that child care is not only a recognized human right, but that it also creates jobs, makes Canada more competitive, helps achieve women's equality and builds local economies.

For all of these reasons, the petitioners call on the Government of Canada to legislate the right to universal access to child care and provide multi-year funding to provincial and territorial governments to build a national system of affordable, high quality, public and not-for-profit child care that is accessible to all children.

I know it is not appropriate for members to endorse petitions, but I want to indicate what a pleasure it is to be able to table this petition in the House today.

[Employment Insurance, June 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, only the Conservatives would see targeting Canadian workers as helping them. How else can we explain changing the fair wages law to make federally contracted construction workers earn less, or why some Canadians would be forced to work for 30% less without even getting a fair chance to look for work in their field?

There have been no consultations, no accountability and no real answers from the minister. These EI changes are a mess. When will the minister finally admit that this is flawed legislation that needs to go back to the drawing board?

[Employment Insurance, June 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it has been a rough few weeks for Canadians looking for answers about employment insurance changes. They are still waiting for the Conservatives to say what “suitable employment” really means; to explain how communities relying on seasonal industries will be affected; to explain whether they are even taking into account the difficulties facing youth, minorities and the disabled in finding jobs.

When will the Conservatives finally do the right thing: stop their attacks and start listening to Canadians concerned about these changes?

[Employment Insurance, May 31st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, this is not about connecting people to jobs. It is about a government that is demonizing Canadians who, through no fault of their own, have been laid off more than once. This out-of-touch government is forcing people to accept jobs, even if the jobs do not correspond to their qualifications, at much lower wages. The Conservatives may say they support free markets, but clearly not when it comes to the labour market.

When will the minister admit that her changes mean people will now be paying the same premiums for less coverage?

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2012]

Madam Speaker, that is an excellent question. I want to respond to both.

First of all, the member is absolutely right. The best way to help unemployed Canadians is with an appropriate job-creation strategy, something the government has done absolutely nothing about. Right now for every six unemployed people in Canada, there is only one job. Unemployment is going to continue unless the government actually gets serious about a job-creation strategy.

Second, the member talks about the CAP program. It is worth noting that of Canadian households that make less than $30,000 a year, 40% of those households actually do not have Internet access. These new changes to the EI system will send people job alerts on the Internet. If people are not able to access those job alerts and those job postings, then the government is not helping them at all. This is a really ill-conceived system. The government needs to go back to the drawing board.

Let us not move forward on the changes the government is proposing. Let us have consultations with Canadians in rural and remote areas and in households that do not have Internet access. Let us get the changes right, and let us improve rather than restrict access to employment insurance.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the question, because clearly the member opposite does not understand the point of employment insurance.

Of course Canadians want to be working. In my hometown of Hamilton, where the manufacturing sector has been decimated, people are desperate to find decent, family-sustaining jobs.

This is not about blaming people who have lost jobs through no fault of their own. This is about making sure those workers have an opportunity to find work at a comparable wage in their field. What is the point of having nurses, go and become farmhands, picking apples. Yes, it is a shame for nurses but it is also a loss to the Canadian economy. It is loss to our health care system.

We absolutely need to provide opportunities for people to work in their field, in their profession. That is what employment insurance is about. That is why workers pay into employment insurance. That is why even employers are suggesting the system is flawed and the changes are flawed. We need to make sure we can keep people working in the field of their choice.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2012]

moved:

That this House call on the Conservative government to abandon plans to further restrict access to Employment Insurance for Canadian workers who have followed the rules and who will now be forced to choose between taking a pay cut of up to 30% or losing their Employment Insurance benefits.

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles.

I am pleased to move, on behalf of the entire NDP caucus, a motion calling on the Conservative government to abandon its reckless changes to Canada's employment insurance system.

First and foremost, employment insurance must be about providing a safety net for workers. Government ministers and Conservative MPs keep saying that jobs are not being filled because the unemployed do not want to work, but Statistics Canada pointed out just last week that there were almost six unemployed workers for every reported job vacancy in Canada. In other words, despite its rhetoric, the Conservative government's record on job creation has been an abject failure.

Therefore, yes, this is the time that workers need to draw on the employment insurance that they paid into all of their working lives. However, instead of helping workers to access what is rightfully theirs, the minister responsible for the program hurls insults by saying, “We do not want to make it lucrative for them to stay home and get paid for it”. It is outrageous. Workers need EI, not so they can stay at home but so they can keep their homes.

Even before these ill-advised changes, only 40% of unemployed Canadians were able to access EI benefits, and those who do bring home a maximum of 55% of their former wages. Unemployed workers can assure the minister that EI is not lucrative.

What then motivated this last round of EI reforms? Toronto Star columnist, Thomas Walkom, hit the nail squarely on the head when he blamed the changes on “bone-headed ideology and contempt”. The Conservatives have continually demonstrated their hatred of Canada's social safety net, including employment insurance, and the disdain starts right at the top.

This is what the Prime Minister told the American Council for National Policy in 1997. He said:

In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance.

He also derided Atlantic Canadians for using social services, saying in 2002:

I think in Atlantic Canada, because of what happened in the decades following Confederation, there is a culture of defeat that we have to overcome.... Atlantic Canada's culture of defeat will be hard to overcome as long as Atlantic Canada is actually physically trailing the rest of the country.

As Walkom rightly points out, “The contempt is that of comfortable, well-heeled politicians who, deep down, assume that those unfortunate enough to have lost their jobs lack moral fibre”. However, the issue is not that Canadians do not want to work. The issue is that there are no jobs available in many parts of our country. Yes, that means that Canadians will try to access employment insurance. It is, after all, a program that was designed to help the jobless get by while they search for work.

As things stand right now, regular EI covers up to 55% of former salary to a maximum of $485 a week for up to 45 weeks. Last year, 850,000 people relied on the program, including thousands in my hometown of Hamilton where the manufacturing sector has been particularly hard hit. If one were to ask people who have tried to access employment insurance, they would be the first to point out that the system does need reform. The reforms just are not in the direction that the government is moving. We need to enhance, not restrict, access to EI for Canadians who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.

As it stands now, less than half of the unemployed qualify for EI benefits. Only 40% of men collect and an even lower 32% of women get any support from EI. The reason is that the rules are biased against part-time, temporary, self-employed and women workers, yet all workers pay into the system.

The conversation we should be having in this chamber is about how we enhance access to the benefits that employees and employers paid for. It is only the workers and the employers who contribute to the EI system. There is not a dime of the government's money in the pot and yet successive Liberal and Conservative governments have raided the surpluses in the EI fund to the tune of $57 billion. They have treated it as their own cash cow to fund everything from debt reduction to new government programs and now it has the audacity to suggest that the program is too lucrative for workers and that things need to change. It is completely outrageous.

If we are going to change the system at all, we should live up to the commitments made by the motion on EI reform that I tabled here in the last Parliament, which, I might add, was passed by the House of Commons. That motion called for the elimination of the two-week waiting period, a lower qualifying period that was consistent across our country, an increase in the replacement wage to 60%, improved funding for training and a mechanism for allowing the self-employed to participate in the program.

Three years later, the government has still only acted on the will of Parliament with respect to one of those proposals, and that is making EI available to the self-employed. All other tinkering the Conservatives have done with respect to the EI system has been counter to the spirit of my motion and has been at the expense rather than to the benefit of hard-working Canadians.

We need to just look at the changes resulting from the most recent Conservative budget. Budget 2012 announced the Conservative government's intention to introduce legislation “to strengthen and clarify what is required of claimants who are receiving regular EI benefits and are looking for work”. Instead, the Trojan Horse bill, Bill C-38, gave the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development the power to create regulations concerning what constitutes suitable employment and reasonable and customary efforts to find employment.

When asked what the regulations would look like, the minister responded, “We haven't announced those details yet. We want to make sure the legislation gets through first”. Really. Do the Conservatives want us to buy a pig in a poke? That will not happen and the more details we learn, the more we know just how misguided the government's approach has become.

Under the new scheme, frequent EI claimants will no longer be able to hold out for something akin to their former jobs at roughly the same wage. Instead, they will need to accept similar work at as little as 80% of their previous wage during the first seven weeks of benefits, yet we do not know what “similar” means. After that, they must take any work they are qualified to perform for as little as 70% of what they used to make. Less frequent users will fare marginally better. They can hold out for jobs within their usual occupation at 90% of their former wage for 18 weeks. After that, they, too, must accept similar jobs at 80% of their previous wage.

Obviously this has nothing to do with connecting workers with suitable jobs. This is all about driving down wages. The Conservatives love free markets unless, of course, it is a labour market. One has to wonder though for whom they are doing this.

Yes, these changes will help their friends in the tar sands hire temporary foreign workers who can now be paid 15% less than the going regional wage. At the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development, where we have been studying the projected shortages of skilled workers in Canada, many employers have actually come forward to tell us that forcing workers in seasonal industries to do other work during the off season will do permanent harm to their businesses and, indeed, to their entire regions. That, of course, is due to out-migration.

If the fisherman's helpers, forestry workers or farmhands are forced during the respective off-season to take on a job they do not like and that pays less, they will be more inclined to head to western Canada. That leaves local businesses high and dry.

When we combine that attack on rural Canada with the fact that stripping Canadians of their employment insurance will lead to an increased reliance on provincial social support systems, it is no wonder that premiers from across the country are crying foul. Despite the fact that it is their provincial budgets and their provincial taxpayers who will pay the price for these ill-conceived changes to Canada's EI system, none of them were consulted before the changes were announced.

As an editorial in the Saskatoon StarPheonix put it:

This is clearly an issue that needs a national debate--one we were robbed of when the government stuffed the changes into its omnibus bill.

That is why the New Democrats have brought this motion to the floor of the House today. We do need a national debate on the changes to Canada's employment insurance system and the people who pay for that system and who use it must have a say in its future. Until then, we must change course and abandon all plans to further restrict access to employment insurance for Canadian workers.

[Employment Insurance, May 29th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, EI is not just a safety net for workers. Entire industries rely on it.

When will the minister hold public consultations with the workers, industries and communities affected? When will she follow the Minister of Finance's advice and talk to the provinces that would be hardest hit?

[Employment Insurance, May 29th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, one conversation with me in the elevator is not a public consultation. The Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development claims that there have been consultations and yet she could not name a single EI-specific consultation anywhere, any time. EI is not just a safety net—