Madam Speaker, I will begin by informing you that I will be sharing my time with the excellent member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot.
I rose in the House on several occasions during the last Parliament, between 2011 and 2015, and especially after 2012, to talk about employment insurance. The reason is simple. The reforms implemented in January 2012 by the former Conservative government were extremely harmful to several Canadian regions, especially eastern Quebec and the Atlantic provinces.
The reforms implemented in 2012 created new categories of claimants, including frequent claimants, who, upon becoming recipients of employment insurance, had to accept jobs paying 70% of their previous salary. Frequent claimants often include those who accept seasonal jobs, which is still quite often the case in eastern Canada.
The Conservatives also removed the definition of “suitable employment” from the legislation. Previously, workers could refuse a job if it did not match their field, skills, or training. The Conservative government eliminated the definition of “suitable employment”. If a worker refused a job that did not match his training, his benefits could be suspended or denied. The previous government forced workers to accept any job within 100 km of their home. Travelling one hundred kilometres is not the same in an urban area as it is in a rural area. In a rural area, it takes one hour to travel 100 km for a job that quite often pays 70% of the worker's previous salary. Naturally, the cost of gasoline is not included in the salary or the benefits. Many workers were thus forced to move and, in particular, to leave rural municipalities, which were greatly affected by this decision.
Various articles and publications then revealed that a system of quotas had been imposed on employment insurance as part of the reform. Public servants were forced to meet savings quotas to recover benefits that had been paid, finding virtually any excuse to meet that quota. This forced public servants, most of whom did not agree with such measures, to conduct extremely invasive inspections. They were often forced to catch claimants on a technicality in order to deny benefits. This often affected some of the most vulnerable Canadians, people who had just lost their jobs.
One other thing that was very damaging was that the government eliminated the boards of referees. These boards were made up of employer, union, and government representatives who understood the local realities in each region and could act as an appeal tribunal for cases where a claimant was denied employment insurance. These boards of referees worked very well but they were eliminated. Instead, the government created the Social Security Tribunal, which has so far been a dismal failure.
It should also be noted that outside of this very specific reform that was implemented in 2012, the Conservatives ended the pilot project that had helped partially fill the spring gap. What is the spring gap? I invite my Conservative friends to listen because they seem to be out of touch with the reality in the regions where there is a significant number of seasonal jobs.
Take the Lower St. Lawrence for example. A worker has to work 720 hours in order to get employment insurance. That means 18 weeks of seasonal work in tourism, forestry, the maple syrup industry, or agriculture. For working 18 weeks, the worker is entitled to 21 weeks of employment insurance benefits, which is the minimum. It is not for the rest of the year, as the Conservatives keep saying. It is 21 weeks, which is the minimum. If we add 18 weeks plus 21 weeks we get 39 weeks. That means that the worker who was laid off because of a seasonal job, has no earnings or opportunity to receive income. The pilot project partially filled that gap in the regions with a high unemployment rate, where a vast number of jobs are seasonal. Again, that is very much how it is in eastern Quebec and eastern Canada.
No one wants economic diversification in my region more than I do, so that the economy does not have to rely on seasonal employment so much, but that is the reality right now. The reform had a major impact on my region. When the reform was implemented, I toured my riding and organized information sessions in Rimouski, Lac-des-Aigles, Dégelis, and Pohénégamook. Those information sessions drew 300 to 400 people who had been directly adversely affected by that reform.
What people told us was that the reform affected not only unemployed workers, but also employers. Earlier, the members for Carleton and Foothills talked about ways to innovate and improve training programs. Currently, the 2012 reform is hurting employers because they have to cover most of the cost of training their employees. Training a brush cutter in the forestry industry costs about $10,000. That is seasonal work. When those people get a job offer, they feel they have no choice but to leave and go elsewhere. That is a net loss for the employer, which then has to hire other people, train them at that same cost, and then watch them leave too because they cannot collect benefits if they get a job offer somewhere else. Those are the stories I heard.
I heard all kinds of stories from the maple syrup, agriculture, and forestry industries. I heard about a woodworking business in Saint-Jean-de-Dieu in my riding that had to close its doors for two months and is closed now because there is no work. It has been paying its employees to do nothing for two months so that it will not lose them because they are highly skilled workers. Those are the kinds of things the Conservatives are refusing to see and accept. They think that job training is a miracle solution for regions with high rates of seasonal employment. That makes no sense.
The employment insurance reform was implemented from coast to coast to address what was then a worker shortage in Alberta and Saskatchewan, but it was at the expense of the other regions, such as eastern Canada, where the reality is completely different.
Another example that has really affected my community is the fact that small municipalities that cannot afford a full-time general manager are forced to hire them for just four, five, or six months of the year. Of course, those individuals then receive EI until they can return to the job, because there is not enough money in the budget. I have seen examples of small municipalities that have lost their general managers to jobs in places like Rimouski or Rivière-du-Loup, because they are less than 100 km away. All that person's knowledge of the municipality and its entire culture and history are lost all at once. The municipality is then forced to hire someone else and train them, only to see them leave again afterwards.
In my riding, we have had to deal with a number of cases. Since the 2012 reform, roughly 500 people from all across my riding have come to my office in Rimouski, and my staff there have helped those people with their fight against the government regarding the loss of their benefits.
A very recent case that we managed to resolve shows how overly harsh the public service is in these cases. I am talking about Pierre Bérubé, who decided to quit his job as a seasonal worker, in order to go into business. He bought a truck and became a truck driver. Employment insurance demanded that he pay $5,000, between the time he purchased his truck and the end of his benefits, since they deemed that he was ready to start working as a truck driver. However, because of the capital investment he had made, he could not go into business right away, and he was preparing to do so. Employment insurance considered that he could start work immediately and imposed a $5,000 penalty on a man who was just trying to get by. This is the kind of overzealousness we saw under the Conservatives.
Today's motion is extremely relevant, because the Liberals made a lot of commitments about EI. Members are familiar with their commitment to reduce the waiting period. However, they also committed to cancelling the EI reform that the Conservatives imposed in 2012. My concern is that the Minister of Families and the Minister of National Revenue, who is also the member for Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine, a region that has been seriously affected, are already indicating that there will not be any significant changes to EI until 2017 or even 2018.
People are in desperate need now. The government made these commitments and we do not need consultation, since we have already seen the consequences of the reform. The government could repeal the reform immediately, and I encourage it to do so. It could start by voting in favour of our motion and immediately bringing down the next budget to move forward with repealing the EI reform.
