Malcolm Allen

[Automotive Industry, May 7th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the government is hypocritical when it comes to its involvement in industry. When our forestry sector needs help, we are told it cannot interfere. When questions are raised about food safety, we are told it cannot interfere. Yet when it comes to auto workers, who have already given up so much, the government tells them to give up more while it eliminates their jobs.

Why is the industry minister only interested when he can force workers to pay more?

[Pensions, May 4th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the pensioners of AbitibiBowater's Thorold plant need to know that their previous employer will be held accountable for their pension obligations and that AbitibiBowater will not be allowed to cut and run from the workers of Thorold.

The pensioners of Canada, regardless of what industries they have spent a lifetime building, deserve more. Canadian pensioners are mothers, fathers, grandparents, and they ought to be spending the time they banked by the sweat of their brow enjoying their grandkids, spending time at the lake, taking care of loved ones or exploring new parts of the world.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Pensioners are facing anxiety and sleepless nights because they have no guarantee of financial security. Their financial security is being destroyed and the ripple effect across Canada is being felt in every home.

Companies must be held accountable for their pension obligations. The very foundation of our society depends on it. Without economic security for our pensioners, the system will crumple under the weight of fear and lost hope.

I want pensioners to know that they are not alone, that New Democrats--

[Canada Consumer Product Safety Act, April 30th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if my colleague could talk about the importation of what we have seen to be toxic substances, indeed toxicity in general with respect to the products that come to our shores. Canada imports a lot of things. I understand the food aspect is not in the bill and we are looking at that from a different perspective.

Should we be looking at this in a risk management sense as to the risks involved, how those risks could be mitigated, and the cost of those risks in an economic sense? Or should we be looking at this strictly in a health protection sense to make sure that kids, parents, grandparents, in fact all consumers know that when they buy products, those products are truly safe and there are regulations to enforce that?

[Employment Insurance Act, April 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, as far as those who are supportive of the bill, Canadian workers are supportive. I need no other validators besides Canadian workers. Those working and those who are unemployed have said to me for the past 20 years in which I have been an EI advocate in different venues that this is what they want to see happen. I have not met a laid off worker yet who has not said, “My severance shouldn't be touched”.

As far as the costing, it is simply a delaying tactic. Severance delays unemployment insurance. People can still collect the same amount of employment insurance at the end. If they are so unfortunate as to be unemployed that length of time, they simply eat up their severance and their entitlement to EI.

There is no cost to the EI system per se because of severance pay. What it does do is it lets people keep their house. It perhaps lets people keep their youngsters who may be involved in recreational or cultural activities in those activities for perhaps an extra month or two. It keeps people out of abject poverty hopefully until they can get a job. That is what keeping their severances does, at no cost to the EI fund. They will qualify for EI anyway and they will collect those numbers of weeks. The old argument was, if people received EI from day one, and had eight weeks worth of severance, we could take that out of the fund by that eight weeks.

In this day and age that is not the case. We all know that. The workers are entitled to it. They ought to be able to keep it. Hopefully the House will pass the bill.

[Employment Insurance Act, April 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I hate to sound like a broken record, but I have said this in the House about a dozen times now. Five weeks of nothing is still nothing. If someone does not qualify, five weeks makes no difference.

The Association of Universities and Colleges has said quite clearly that if the government does not provide somewhere close to about $1.5 billion to build spaces in community colleges, those apprenticeship programs will not mean a tinker because no one will have a seat to sit in. These are at the top end and there are no places for one to sit.

Yes, they need the added five weeks, and I congratulate the government for adding those additional weeks for those who qualify. However, what will the government do about the other 54% that do not? Just leave them out there with nothing? That is a typical attitude. Fifty-four per cent does not mean anything to the government. It is simply going to discard those people.

We say, no. It used to be 86%. The government has the opportunity to bring that other 30% back into the system.

[Employment Insurance Act, April 28th, 2009]

moved that Bill C-279, An Act to amend the Employment Insurance Act (amounts not included in earnings), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to debate my private member's bill today on the issue of severance and vacation pay for those who may receive it for pension income.

The EI act looks at moneys in certain ways. It sometimes takes it into income and sometimes it does not. Sometimes it treats it in a different manner. In the case of severance pay, which is due employees upon their termination of employment, it treats that income differently, as if they were actually collecting employment insurance and out in the workforce.

At this moment in time, the gross up provision, which is an anomaly in the act, says that individuals can earn 40% of a claim up to $179 while on a claim. The act takes severance and deducts that dollar for dollar from their claim and leaves those individuals with less because they have severance rather than if they had actually taken on part-time work and deducted that in a different manner. This is really an inequitable system.

The nub of all this is that severance pay is really about pay for time that has gone before. In other words, in some situations individuals would get paid a week for every year that they may have been employed.

There are two parts of the act that talk about earnings as paid and payable. I would suggest that we ought to look at severance pay the way we did some 20 years ago when it was not used as a calculation for unemployment insurance. It was deemed to have been paid because it really was for the time that individuals spent prior to their termination because that is how it was generated in the first place. Severance pay is not paid on a go forward basis in the sense that individuals would be paid for what they might have worked. They are actually being paid for the time they did work.

At some point the act was changed to have those moneys deducted. Severance was seen to be as if someone was working but clearly they were not. That is why they were given severance pay. The reason it is called severance pay is because the individual was severed from employment.

What happened? What transpired that changed the system? We have to go back some 20 years and look at the changes that started to come into effect during the latter part of the eighties and well into the nineties under the leadership of two previous governments. The Conservatives enacted some changes in the 1980s. During the nineties, the Liberal government made a wholesale change of the system, reducing the number of people who qualified from a high of nearly 86% back in 1990 to the lows we see today, which is less than one in two, just slightly under 50%.

Why did that occur? What situation was so dramatic that the unemployment system needed to be changed wholesale?

The first question we need to ask is whether or not the system had enough money. The obvious answer to that is, no, because we know the surplus in the EI system during the nineties and into the early 2000s was approximately $54 billion. That money rightfully belonged to workers who had paid into the system, who were rightfully entitled to receive benefits from that system, and who saw the system actually become denigrated to the point where they were no longer able to collect from that system.

The obvious question to ask is, what happened to the $54 billion? Some of us are still asking that question today. It seems as if that money has vanished. In fact, some say it has been absconded. Some say it went to the surpluses of the Liberal government that preceded this Conservative government. Liberals wracked up those great surpluses talking about economic management. What the Liberal government actually did was take it from those who paid into the system and then denied them entry into the system. One has to wonder, what if we had left the $54 billion in there, would we need to drawback the severance pay of those who, at this point in their lives, need it?

This reminds me of the story of a young woman in Oshawa who received a severance package when she was laid off. She no longer lived with her parents, who had been laid off before her. Her father asked if she could assist them because they were going to lose their house because they were going to default on their mortgage. He was still waiting for employment insurance. His severance pay was basically gone because he had to use it up before he qualified for EI. She agreed to turn over her severance pay to help them keep their house. That is what families in this country do for one another.

However, under this present system, she has signed herself into poverty. The fact that she gave the severance package to her parents does not negate the fact that she will have to wait an equal amount of time of that severance pay. It would be exhausted out before she is eligible to qualify for EI. And if she qualifies subsequent to that, she would then collect.

For ease of example, if she is entitled to eight weeks worth of severance and she gives it to her parents, she will have no income for the next eight weeks. Employment insurance will not pay her one thin dime because of that. She will wait out those eight weeks and the two week waiting period for a total of 10 weeks. She will fill out a report for the next two weeks, perhaps on the third week, which will now take her to week 15. If she is extremely lucky and the system works the way it is supposed to, she will receive her first cheque on week 16. In the meantime, she has no source of income because the severance pay that has been allocated for her has all but been exhausted because of her willingness to help her parents.

When we look at that, it tells us there is something wrong with the system. The system was never designed to take people's severance pay. Severance pay was never designed to be seen as earnings. It is for income tax purposes, but it was never designed to be a qualifier for EI. That is the way the act was initially.

This bill talks about the future, but it goes back to the past at the same time to recapture the days when the system actually worked for the unemployed. That is not the way it works now.

When it comes to the issue of why it should be changed, it begs the question of why it changed. We are still waiting for that answer. No one from either government, Liberal or Conservative, has been able to explain to us that it was changed out of necessity. One might posit the suggestion that it was changed to reduce the EI premium. I think if we went to workers and asked them if they really needed $2 or $3 off their EI premium every week, which is basically a cup of coffee and a doughnut, most would probably say, “No, thank you”. They would ask us to keep the premium the way it was and to keep that money in the system so that if they perchance get laid off, the system will be there to protect them.

Twenty years ago, individuals could collect more money on EI than they can today. Think about that. Twenty years ago, we could collect more dollar for dollar on EI, of course at that time we called it unemployment insurance, than we can today under the present employment insurance system because it used to be 66% of earnings. It as driven down to 60%. It has now been driven down to 55%. Unless we get changes, we are going to see more folks in poverty than we have ever seen in this country's history.

Because of the system that we pay into, those of us who work, those Canadians out there who toil every day, who are paying their premium on a regular basis in good faith expecting to qualify, are finding themselves thrown onto this heap. It becomes a maze for them and it becomes this whole system of inequity. For them, that is an injustice because it is their system. It does not belong to us. It does not belong to the House. It belongs to workers. Those are the folks who contributed. Those are the folks who built up the fund. Those are the folks who built up the surplus.

Those are the folks who expected to draw on a surplus in a time of need. Now, when they find an absolute time of need, what do they find? The surplus is not there. We are not sure where it went. There is some conjecture about where it went. They are not sure where it went. Their hard-earned money disappeared. They ask if they can get into the system. They want to be treated the same as others across this land and, indeed, they are not. We have workers in certain parts of this country who have to have more hours than others.

There is an easy fix to all of this. New Democrats proposed and received the majority approval of the House to make changes. We asked the government to do that. At this economic moment in time, Canadians who work hard every day, pay into the system, and play by the rules are telling the government to listen to what they are saying. They need change. They need the system to be modified the way it once was, when it protected them as workers when they were unemployed. That is all they are asking for. They are not asking for their taxes to be raised. They are not asking for a government handout. They are just asking for some of the money they put in back.

I do not think that is an unfair request. In fact, I would suggest that is a more than reasonable request because ultimately it was theirs in the first place. We collected for them as a government and as a Parliament and we administered it for them. They gave us their money in trust, not for us to do willy-nilly whatever the government wanted depending on the flavour of the day. Workers said to us, “Here is our hard-earned money, it is our insurance premium. We expect to collect our insurance when we need it”. What have they found now that they really need it? It is not there and now we have made all these rules to make sure they are excluded so we can push them aside, so we can tell them they just do not qualify in the system, sorry. Yes, they paid their premium, but we are sorry about the fact that they do not qualify.

Instead we can reverse the system. We could go back to what it once was. We could go back to a day when 86% of those who paid into the system qualified within the system. We could go back to a day where 66% of earnings were qualified as insurable earnings and were paid. As members of Parliament, who live on a salary which is very commendable and very lucrative, I defy any of us to wake up tomorrow and say we are going to work on 55 cent dollars. In our case, if we were unemployed tomorrow, we would be collecting $435 a week and I would have a hard time thinking that most of us in the House would actually manage to live on that. But again, that is the high end. That is not the average. The average is close to $340 a week. Living on $340 a week before deductions, because people still pay income tax on that, and raise a family is impossible.

We know all of those things and the government knows all of those things. It talks about statistics of who qualifies and who does not. It tells us every day that it understands the needs out there. Ministers stand in their place every day and tell us they understand. If the government truly understands, it should change the system. We are not asking to reinvent it. It does not have to because we basically told it how to do it. New Democrats, with our friends in the opposition benches who voted for it, put a plan in front of the government so it did not have to go to the department to get it rejigged and all those marvellous things. It simply has to enact it. It could go back to 1993 and bring that act forward and implement it again. I am sure the Parliamentary Library has a copy. It would be dead easy. It will not be hard or difficult.

Canadians who are unemployed will be forever grateful, not just to the government but to all of us in the House because it is about all of our constituents. There is no constituency in this land that does not have someone unemployed. Not one of us has full employment in our area, so we are dealing on behalf of all our constituents.

It is an absolute crime if we are not willing to raise the hand that we are fully capable of doing in the House, raising that hand to our fellow Canadians who find themselves in a time of need through no fault of their own. Unemployment is not a choice. The rules are clear, if people quit a job they do not qualify. We need the will of the House to have the government implement what has been spoken from this side.

As we look at the situation, it never was lucrative to be on employment insurance. For those who think it was, they are absolutely misleading folks. If anyone had been on employment insurance, they would know it is not lucrative.

For the government, now is the opportunity to make changes. The NDP motion has shown how to mend a system that is truly broken. I ask the government to do the right thing and accept the NDP changes and correct an EI system that the previous Liberal government destroyed. Now is the government's opportunity to say that it knew better than the Liberals when they were in government and it has fixed it for workers. Workers will forever be grateful. Conservatives should not lose that opportunity.

[Replacement Workers, April 23rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to rise on this motion in support of anti-scab legislation, or at least a bill that proposes anti-scab legislation. My background as a trade unionist means that I come with a certain bias, but I come with it very proudly and I wear it on my lapel. I have been involved in bargaining over the years and I understand when we have legislation that prohibits scabs from entering a workplace and when it does not.

I can say this from fact, because at one point in my life I negotiated with police forces around what one would call strike protocol. When one does that, it is really about ensuring the safety of everyone: the managers who want to go into that particular facility, the workers who are on strike or a lockout, and the general public as a whole, to make sure that they are going to be safe when they are around that particular situation. It can indeed affect the public, and not just from the business perspective of selling a product or not. It may be close to a street that is busy.

When an employer decides to use scabs to enter a workforce that is being either locked out or struck, the potential for violence is set up. The police will say they know that is what will happen. Consequently, it escalates a situation and takes it away from the bargaining process.

It is really about bargaining. While the two entities are apart in their desires and how they intend to get there, they are nonetheless in a process where they are going to sit down and try to find an amenable situation where they can come to some sort of an agreement.

When this third force, or third leg, is entered into the process, it makes the water murky and prohibits the bargaining process from going forward and concluding. The employer thinks it has the additional leg up and can exact what it needs from its employees through this third leg when it comes to introducing scabs into the workplace.

History has shown us what it has done. It has made strikes last longer. It has caused undue violence and hardship to all the parties concerned. Not only are those scabs ostracized and perhaps violence inflicted on them, unfortunately, but we see violence on the picket line when legitimate picketers are run down by vehicles driven by those intent on getting scabs into a workplace.

My hon. colleague from the Bloc and I have absolute proof of that. Not so many years ago, in Chatham, a gentleman on a picket line was run over by a van driven by a security force hired by that company to try to get scabs into the workplace. It never succeeded in doing that. The company likes to call them “replacement” workers, because that sounds like a really nice word; if folks do not want to work, they will just replace them with someone else. What they really are in the vernacular are scabs. They are taking work and taking the bread and food off the tables of those hard workers who have been there for a long time.

That man was run over and seriously injured. To this day, he has not been able, and will probably never be able, to return to his work as an electrician. All he was doing was participating in a legal strike, no more and no less. He was not perpetrating violence on anyone. He was not doing what we would consider to be illegal, nor did the law see it to be illegal. He was involved in a legitimate picket. Yet that group of individuals working for that security force took it upon themselves to drive that van through a group of people.

They did not drive through a barricade or the picket line barrels used to keep people warm in the winter. They drove through a group of people as if the van were a bowling ball and the people were the pins. They knocked this gentleman down and critically injured him, almost killing him. Unfortunately for him and his family, he has obviously not been able to return to work. He has suffered many operations over the years because of a situation in Ontario where the use of scabs and replacement workers was permitted.

If we were to pass this and get back to truly bargaining, the parties would actually understand that they had to bargain and that they had to get to a conclusion. What we have learned in the bargaining process, those of us who have intimate knowledge of it, those of us who have done it, is that we eventually get to the end of that process. We get it resolved. We never win everything we want, but neither do we lose everything we think we are going to lose. At the end, we actually have an agreement between the parties that allows those parties to continue forward, that company to flourish, and those workers to be rewarded in the sense that they feel is justified.

However, when we have replacement workers, what enters into that process makes it very difficult. In fact, it is poison. After everything gets resolved, we have a poisoned atmosphere when the workers who went strike or got locked out eventually return to work.

I will use my Conservative colleagues across the way as an example. We will still be in the same place at the end of the day. What that means is that we will still have to work together.

If we poison the atmosphere because we bring in scabs, that atmosphere remains poisoned for years, in some situations, because folks do not forgive that easily when they have been left out not just necessarily in the cold but have been left in poverty because they have not been able to get back to work when indeed a bargaining process could have enabled that to happen.

So we end up with a situation that is avoidable. That is the real dilemma in all of this. It is an unnatural thing that gets brought into the bargaining process. The times we see replacement workers, in nearly every instance, it is in a unionized workplace. I do not know of any other circumstances, and I will allow other members to perhaps teach me some history that I may not know of where we see replacement scab workers coming into a workplace that is non-unionized. It is only targeted at those workplaces where the workers themselves, in a democratic process, have chosen to be organized and have chosen the union to represent them. They have said to that employer that this is the group they wish to have speak for them. Yet we as a government have the ability to make sure that level playing field happens again and that we do not have that third intrusion, which really is this gap.

When we talk about democratic rights, about human rights, and about the right to organize and bargain, this is a fundamental principle. If memory serves me correctly, there was an appeal to the charter about the right to organize a union for a specific sector of workers, and the charter spoke to that and said they had the absolute right.

I would suggest that what we need to see is the absolute right for the bargaining process to be allowed to continue to its fruition. Again, as I say, it will not always be perfect. The bargaining process never is, because it is with opposing parties, having opposing views, and trying to find resolution. However, what I do know is that the parties, especially when it comes to organized labour, understand and take their responsibility very seriously. They understand that taking their members out on strike will indeed cause great hardship on their members. They do not do it lightly.

I think if we had the ability to make sure that the process was not interrupted by replacement workers, we would absolutely find that process moved more quickly, came to better results, gave us more harmonious labour relations, and indeed, at the end of it, made sure that we did not see another gentleman like the one we saw in Chatham, who is maimed for life.

I think that is why we need to have this done. We need to support this bill. I would encourage all members in the House to support it because it really is about protecting workers, and I think that is what we all stand for.

[Business of Supply, April 23rd, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech on financial literacy. Perhaps rather than being in the House giving a speech on financial literacy to those folks who actually need interest rate relief, he really should have been giving it to the friends in the Conservative Party who are actually in the financial institutions, because they have needed it in the last year. The meltdown we see across the globe in financial institutions is about financial literacy, is about folks who do not understand what they are doing. In fact, the major players in the banking industry, including Canadian bankers, have said they do not really understand what they did. So perhaps the hon. member should have started with them instead of lecturing consumers on how they need to have more financial literacy.

What Canadian consumers need, and need now, is rate relief on their credit cards, not how to be able to decipher the rate relief. They need true rate relief. I wonder if my hon. colleague would comment on the fact that, for consumers today who are choosing hydro, a roof over their heads and food, not web-based financial literacy skills, how indeed the Conservatives intend to give that rate relief through the web?

[Business of Supply, April 23rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his comments this morning and indeed deciding to become a Luddite since he has decided to support this motion. Perhaps there is a pair of Birkenstocks somewhere for him if we can find it.

When we talk about people in those terms, sometimes we should take great pride in that because when the other parties were musing about banking deregulation, which they seem to have forgotten in the midst of all this uncertainty, when the banks were talking about it, there were some parties in the House, certainly not New Democrats, who were really musing about letting that happen because that is where international commerce was headed and maybe we should look at deregulating the banks and letting them merge and letting American banks come into this country. New Democrats led the way and said that is not a good idea and we should not deregulate the banks. History has proven us to be correct.

Now, of course, the Liberals and Conservatives want to share in that joy. If we were to allow that to happen, we would be in a much greater disaster than we are today when it comes to the financial situation. Credit card fees would probably be that much higher and defaults even greater. If the member could comment on that, I would appreciate it.

[Business of Supply, April 23rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, in a nutshell, we are seeing increasing poverty in my community. Poverty in my region is higher than the average in Ontario, and it is going up not down.

With the crisis before us, we know the poverty rate will simply go higher. The type of debt load that those folks have to carry just means they will be in poverty that much sooner, that much longer, which will be that much more of a hardship for them.