Mr. Speaker, I am standing today to speak to Bill C-44, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code and the Employment Insurance Act. We will be supporting the bill, as we have heard in the House this morning, but I do have a couple of comments that are worth noting.
First, I thank the critics on our side of the House who have been working on this and have provided us with very good information. One of my great pleasures since being elected is getting to know people and watching them work. I extend that to all members of the House. The committees often work very well and that is another real pleasure of this job.
It is a good bill because it moves beyond partisan politics in some senses and affects families in their greatest time of need. I will say a little more about this later. In the end, we support the bill because it would ease the suffering of parents.
In terms of background, Bill C-44 is an amendment to the Canada Labour Code and would extend the leave of absence available to parents. It would allow for the extension of maternity and parental leave by the number of weeks that a child is hospitalized during the leave. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to have an ill child. This would go some way to alleviate some of the intense stress that is felt during this period. I do wonder if this includes children who are hospitalized in private clinics or abroad , because that is not specified in the bill. That perhaps is something I will leave for another day, or perhaps, as the bill becomes law and it works through administratively, the extent to which this is extended might need to be revised as we move along.
The bill also would grant an unpaid leave of absence for up to 37 weeks for parents of critically ill children and would extend the period of absence that could be taken due to an illness or injury without fear of layoff for 17 weeks. Therefore, it would provide security for workers in uncertain times. We have had an update from the Minister of Finance, who is usually rosy and perhaps overly optimistic about the Canadian economy sometimes, but we have had a warning that perhaps things are not as rosy as they are made out to be, so anything we can do to alleviate stress is important.
It is also important to note that this change would apply exclusively to federally regulated industries. Hopefully, the provinces will make these changes to their own labour codes. This happened when compassionate care benefits were introduced.
Bill C-44 would make changes to the EI Act to allow for the stacking of special benefits, such as stacking maternity, sickness and parental benefits. That is something that could probably be explored in other areas as well. The new benefit for parents of critically ill children created by the bill would, of course, be stackable with other special benefits.
We support the bill and we are also glad to see that the bill has wider support within the community. For example, the Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association and the Canadian Caregiver Coalition are all behind it. It is good to know and it is nice that we can all work together and move this forward.
There are some contextual problems that we might want to talk about a bit here, although the bill seems to be sound at this point. We are willing to overlook some of the problems in the hope that they may be amended in the future. At this point, there is a problem with funding. For example, in the Conservatives' 2011 platform, their most recent platform, they promised, “Funding for this measure will come from general revenue, not EI premiums”. It is important to recognize that the devil is often in the details here and we would have preferred the program to be funded out of general revenues. It does look like the Conservatives have ignored their promise. Although they have delivered on the act in substance, the funding could have come from general revenues. This costly measure comes at a time when the EI account has a cumulative deficit of $9 billion. We would be adding a small bit to that deficit.
More important, the government is avoiding much larger problems with the EI system in general. As we are giving comfort to those who are in need here, we also need to make amendments to the EI Act and the process by which EI is garnered by those who are out of work. We should be making changes in order to give those people comfort.
It is very tough to be out of work. We are in the midst of a great change in Canada where we are moving from a primary industry to a manufacturing-based industry and now much a more service-based economy where jobs are fluid. We have a duty federally, through the EI program, to ensure that people's stress is relieved as they go through the strange fluctuations in the job market. Right now, fewer than half of all unemployed Canadians are receiving EI benefits.
The other thing I want to make clear, aside from my general comments, is the idea that this is a very minor change. The minister has estimated, which we have heard in the House today, that this bill would affect approximately 6,000 Canadians per year. I do not want to at all undermine how much help this would mean for the 6,000 Canadians. Any small thing we can do to help people with critically-ill children is important, but it is a small number of people within the larger pool of 33 million-plus Canadians. There are still many unemployed Canadians who are not able to access regular EI benefits and this bill fails to address some of the larger issues at play. Since the Conservatives are willing to open the door a bit on this issue, perhaps we can open it much wider.
If we do the math, over 500,000 Canadians were receiving EI regular benefits in July of this year but almost 1.4 million were counted as unemployed. This means that there are almost 900,000 unemployed Canadians who are not collecting EI. If we think about the stress that means for these people's families, it would seem that some larger remedy is required in this instance, especially when we see unemployment rates of 7%-plus being maintained over the long term. The uncertainty in the global market, which we hear so much about from the other side of the House, means that perhaps 7% will linger for a long time or perhaps even increase, especially if the U.S. goes over its infamous fiscal cliff. That means fewer than 4 in 10 unemployed Canadians are receiving EI, which is a historic low.
I would be remiss if I did not pull this over into my own portfolio as critic for science and technology in terms of unemployment and how the government is dealing not only with unemployment but remedies to it. On the weekend, I met with constituents and heard from a former employee of MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates. This person was involved in the RADARSAT program, a program on which the government has made a policy decision to withdraw funding, although there was an initial commitment. This a four-stage program and the government committed to the first three stages and, in the end, has decided to withdraw funding. Because of this, 60 employees were let go from the Richmond MDA offices in B.C. and there is uncertainty as to whether the hundreds of highly-qualified people will be rehired.
The other day, the President of the Treasury Board bragged about how many thousands of people he has thrown out of federal jobs. I think the number was 11,000 and that the goal of the government was 20,000. This will only move people onto the EI rolls. The best minds will, of course, leave the country but the people who were in jobs of a more technical nature will be on EI. It is really important to ensure that if the government is going to make these moves, which it should not, it should ensure that EI is accessible for the people who need it. In this case, it is short-term pain for even worse long-term pain.
While we support this bill, as it would help families the most in need, it leaves a lot of larger issues unaddressed. We call on the government to follow our suggestions and open this up to a much larger debate.