Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to the budget. Part of that issue is about what it means when we talk about a Speech from the Throne. We talk about a budget and we talk about this whole sense of what it means to place action toward that. The budget is the piece of legislation that places action toward that.
What we have seen here, indeed, is a lack of that because it talks about jobs and prosperity, but what it does not do inside the budget is actually place action. It does not put the money into the programs that indeed we need across this country to ensure that we are actually going to see jobs and prosperity.
One of the things we have heard constantly from a great many of the economists who have talked about where this economy is going is about a jobless recovery. I know members opposite in the government will talk about increases in the GDP and all those lovely numbers that have constantly been set forth, but that does not translate into jobs for folks on main street.
What we are seeing across this land is stubbornly high unemployment. In fact, we are seeing people who are not covered by employment insurance anymore. As we saw in 2009, a great many people did not qualify for EI. What we now see is a whole group of people falling off EI, and we also see a huge number of people who are underemployed if not unemployed, but no longer registered because they no longer collect EI, so therefore they are not counted.
Indeed, with a national rate that might be 8%, when we add on those who are underemployed, who want to be employed full-time, when we look at folks who ultimately, at the end of the day, are not gainfully employed at this moment in time, who want to be but are not counted in the rate, that 8% might indeed be more like 12.6%, even closer to 13% or 14%.
When we talk about jobs and prosperity, especially for young people, what we see with the unemployment rate across this country for young people under the age of 25 is that it is exceeding 20%. This is not a transition of young people going from school to the work force. It is that young people just cannot find work.
In an area like mine, where we have the fourth oldest population base in this country, we see young people leaving because they do not find work in the communities that they want to stay in, where they have been raised by their families, where they have attachments to families, and where they actually want to stay and continue to grow that community.
We lose from both ends. We lose the young people. We lose those skills going forward to somewhere else, and then when they find out that it is not as good there either, quite often they find their way back, sometimes to mom and dad for that type of support because it is that bad.
I have heard colleagues talk in the House in the last couple of days about EI and what this budget does or does not do. My colleague from Acadie—Bathurst really set the tone today on the debate when it comes to EI and what happened. I know that fingers get pointed back and forth between the Conservatives and the Liberals about who spent the $57 billion. Let me not point the finger and just simply say it was spent. The issue now is that it needs to be put back. It is owed to those who contributed. It was a contribution from workers and their employers to cover workers in their greatest time of need, when they were unemployed. What needs to happen now is it should be re-established. The government owes that money and it should be put back. It was taken. It does not matter which stripe we want to suggest took it. It was taken and spent.
By the government's admission, the cupboards are bare. It is gone now. That is fine. That happens to all of us in family finances from time to time. The cupboard goes bare, but what we do is we work toward filling it again, and that is what the government should set as a course for itself.
The talk about why it disappeared is somewhere I do not necessarily want to go, but I want to talk about what could have been done if indeed it had not been spent willy-nilly. If it indeed had been spent in a constructive way, we would not need to see the number of private members' bills on EI reform that we have seen. I am not suggesting that they are not good private members' bills for reform. Indeed, they are.
The New Democrats, the Bloc and the Liberal Party have put forward a number of bills to enhance and change the system.
The problem is that this is a piecemeal fix. It is not a substitution for taking the overall plan and asking how we fix it. I heard my colleague from Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor talking earlier about the EI piece when it comes to sickness benefits. If we had looked at the whole system, as a holistic approach, we could have fixed what is a reprehensible system where one is only allowed to be sick for 15 weeks. Tell that to the person who has contracted the illness. If people contract an illness that makes them sick for 30 weeks, they still only get paid for 15 weeks. Does that mean they are any less ill? Of course not. The system is skewed and needs to be fixed.
If either government had not spent the money, we could have fixed the system in its entirety, not one little bit at a time with a Band-aid here and a Band-aid there to try to stop the hemorrhaging.
I believe we have an opportunity with this budget to tell the government that the entire system needs to be fixed. The government has heard lots of good ideas. Time and time again I have seen the Prime Minister stand in his place and implore us on the other side of the aisle to give him our best ideas.
We have been giving him our best ideas, especially when it comes to EI reform. We have a myriad of private member's bills that talk about reforming the system and that, if taken in their totality, would fix the entire system, whether it be the sick benefits, the waiting time period, the hours or severance and vacation pay that were part of a bill I presented to this House but, unfortunately was defeated.
We could have fixed all of that system and had a system that works for Canadian workers in their greatest time of need, when they are unemployed. When they are unemployed they need the system to protect them, and that is why they paid for their insurance.
I will now move on to pensions. This budget gives us the opportunity to fix pensions, especially when it comes to CCAA. We can look at the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, which is a federal statute. I can give an example of what happened in my riding a number of years ago with workers at Atlas Steel in Welland. They received a registered letter at their home on a Friday evening telling them that Atlas Steel had gone into CCAA and that their pensions would be reduced by 50% as of Monday, not a year Monday but as of Monday, and that their benefits were expiring at midnight on Sunday. They had two days to get their house in order. They were losing their benefits and losing half of their pension. This was to a group of retired workers, not workers in the plant who knew they were going into bankruptcy and who were still working. This was to the workers who had been retired, many for a long time, who relied on that pension to survive. Their pensions disappeared.
What we need to do is protect pensions and this budget gives us that opportunity because there is some mention about what we do about unfunded liabilities and pensions, but it is not very clear. However, there are bills in this House that talk about how we should fix it. We can do that. The unfunded liabilities and pensions is a budget issue.
I have something to read to my colleagues, which I know my good friend from Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor will like to hear. This statute comes from the AbitibiBowater workers in my riding in Thorold. They have come together to talk about what has happened to them under CCAA and what is going to happen. They say, “Faced with the prospects of such a reduction in our monthly pensions, we formed an association in mid-2009 to protect contractual rights to full pensions, as AbitibiBowater was searching for ways and means to restructure its operations and finance it to get out of court protection”.
They have come together as a community group of retired persons. These are not workers and plant management. These are retired workers who are saying that if they lose their pensions because of the CCAA at AbitibiBowater in Thorold it will have a huge impact on their community.
I believe my colleague from Windsor had said that before. What will happen is that these folks who are left in the community will have less money in their pockets to stay in their homes, pay their property taxes and feed themselves.
We not only had an obligation, we had the ability to fix it but we simply blinked and let it go away. I think that is a great injustice, not only to the workers at AbitibiBowater and at Atlas Steel in Welland but across our broader land where people are looking to us. They are telling us that the EI is in crisis and that their pensions are in crisis. They want to know what we are doing to ensure that during their most vulnerable time they will be protected.
