Yvon Godin

[Employment Insurance, February 13th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, seasonal industry representatives and NDP members are not the only ones opposed to the employment insurance reform. The Conservative government of New Brunswick is also raising its voice because Conservative members are not doing their job in Ottawa.

The deputy premier of my province, Paul Robichaud, says he is opposed to the reform as it was introduced by the federal government in the spring.

Is the minister starting to get the message? Will she suspend the reform, as the premier and deputy premier of New Brunswick have requested?

[Employment Insurance, February 11th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the minister says there have been no cuts. This would mean that the five-week pilot project has been restored. I wish to thank the minister for that.

The EI reform is causing chaos in my region and across eastern Canada. Workers blocked downtown Tracadie-Sheila this morning. It was the third protest in five days. The New Brunswick Minister of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour, who is a Conservative, is asking for an emergency meeting because he realizes that the reform is unfair and simply will not fly.

Does the minister realize that we are in this situation because she did not want to consult with workers or the provinces? She can toss her reform in the garbage.

[Enhancing Royal Canadian Mounted Police Accountability Act, February 11th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety spoke about the New Democrats wanting their way. If it is not their way, they vote against it.

Is it the first time the members have heard from the government, in a democratic institution like this one, where we are here to debate and study a bill and have amendments, that it seems unable to accept any amendments coming from the NDP? They seem to have formed a government that wants it their way or the highway. If it is not their way, and we are not on their side, it is as if we are not on the side of the right thing. Is a bill not there to be studied and to receive amendments to make a better bill? Is that not what this building, this Parliament, is all about? I would like to hear the member on this.

[Business of Supply, February 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very closely to the member for Lévis—Bellechasse. What would he say to the people from out east, to the women who want to go work as cleaners in Fort McMurray, where the men have gone? They are being told that there is no work, yet temporary foreign workers are being brought in from the Philippines, China and other countries. People from eastern Canada want to go work there, but they are being told that there is nothing there, that they cannot go. What would he say to those people?

What would he say to the scaffolder who called me yesterday? He wanted to go work in Alberta, but he cannot because companies there have hired Americans. Our people cannot go work there. What would he say to those people?

What would he say to the woman out east who this morning was visited by an employee from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada who was delivering some forms and who told her that if she did not try to find a job by 1 p.m. the next day, he would see her in his office and take away her employment insurance benefits? What would he say to those people?

I would like to hear from the member for Lévis—Bellechasse, who says that the government is doing such wonderful work and that the Conservatives are there to help people find jobs. But really, they are there to cut people's employment insurance. That is what they are doing.

[Business of Supply, February 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am not against the fact that the government is giving people information to help them find a job. It would be terrible to say that we do not want people to know. We know why employment insurance exists: in case you lose your job.

But we have gotten to a point where, in regions that survive on seasonal work, over 2,000 people are laid off at the same time in the fall. What do we do with those people? That is the situation and that was the reason for the pilot project. That is where it hurts.

I just received an email, and I will talk about it quickly. A government official was at a house in Tracadie-Sheila to bring forms to be filled out to prove that the person had looked for work. The employee had to go to the Tracadie-Sheila office the next day with the completed forms, otherwise his unemployment would be cut off. And you say you want to help workers, when it has gotten to the point that your officials are going to people's homes.

I would like an answer from the member who just rose to say that the government is trying to help workers. It is to the point that police-types are being sent to homes. Sending officials to people's homes has never been done before in Canada. This is just the beginning. Where will this end?

You say that this is a good country and that we need to be a united country. Your Conservative government is not going to create a united country by treating workers this way.

[Business of Supply, February 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it does affect families. Nobody can say that it does not.

It is fine and dandy when people want to go elsewhere. But the minister told people that they should go work elsewhere. On television Thursday night, Tasha Kheiriddin said that we are a nation of immigrants and that people should be expected to go anywhere. That is the kind of thing people are saying.

Women who have to go work in Fort McMurray have to leave behind their family, their children. What is happening, what people are saying, is inhuman.

The minister turned around and told people to find work within an hour of home. But in Canada we have a thing called winter. For people travelling from Caraquet to Bathurst or Bathurst to Shippagan, storms are not just about snow. The wind alone is storm enough.

Yet the government wants to force 2,000 to 3,000 women who lose their jobs in fish plants to travel. Other people, 60-year-olds, do not have the education to get another job. People are nervous. The government is disrespecting workers, treating them with contempt. This affects families. Lots of people go west, and then they come back. The number of divorces and separations is incredible. It happens constantly.

People in my region are committing suicide. If the Acadie Nouvelle reports the death at home of a 40-year-old, it is not because of a heart attack. The suicide rate in my region is high. That is why I get so worked up in the House. I know the devastating effects of all of this on our people, on workers all over the Gaspé and the Atlantic provinces.

The government has no respect, and neither did the Liberals when they stole $57 billion from the employment insurance fund.

[Business of Supply, February 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives accuse us of saying things that are false. We are asking the minister to join us on the ground and asking Conservative members to explain how anything we are saying is false. The minister says there is no reform.

Yet, as she explains, there will be a 30% drop in salaries, people will have to accept work an hour away from their home and the board of referees and umpires will be removed. But there is no reform.

People back home know that this will hurt them. Employers understand that they will lose good workers who are trained in the industry. They cannot afford that. But it gets worse. Those employees will be replaced by temporary foreign workers.

It appears that the formula will be to make our people work 12 months of the year and to put temporary foreign workers into seasonal jobs. They will pay income tax and pay into EI, and then they will go back home on the next plane out. That is what the Conservatives are trying to set up. They want to replace seasonal workers with temporary foreign workers. That is not what people want. These are our communities, and they are important to us.

It is a shame that the minister refuses to meet with workers on this matter. If she were a responsible minister, she would agree to attend the meeting on February 27.

[Business of Supply, February 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP motion today very clearly calls on the Conservatives to throw their reform in the trash bin. That is what the people are calling for. The motion is calling for the five weeks pilot project to be reinstated, to avoid what is called the “black hole”. These are the two things set out in the NDP motion.

When we say throw the bill in the trash bin, we do not mean to come back with something else. And while we are on the subject—I have been here and I have been talking about employment insurance for a long time—I would like some attention to be paid to the employment insurance program, to seasonal jobs and to our regions. I would like the piecemeal cuts to employment insurance to stop, and I would like the government instead to find a way to make the program work for working people. It is an insurance policy.

In all honesty, it is called an insurance program that employees and employers pay into, but if there were a vote today on whether employers want to pay into the employment insurance fund, the answer would be no.

Employers are happy to profit from employees, but when they are done with them, they want to get rid of them. I say that with all due respect, even though I know it will make some people angry. In its employment insurance reform, the government is offering to allow companies not to pay up to $1,000 in employment insurance for each new employee. The government will even help companies collect $1,000 if they hire a new person, when the purpose of employment insurance is to help workers.

On the subject of Bill C-38, what the NDP is saying is that if the government wanted to make changes to employment insurance and it was just a matter of clarifications, why did it not bring them up at the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities? Why did it not invite industry and workers? Why did it not sit down with those people to address the problem?

When the Liberals made their changes, it started with the Conservatives, in 1988. At that time, the Liberals said that if there were changes to employment insurance it would be disastrous for New Brunswick. I recall the former minister of human resources, who was not the minister at the time, Doug Young, who in 1993 replaced the minister who is still in the House today as the minister for ACOA, saying that was insulting.

The government has said that the NDP is scaring people, but the first thing the minister for ACOA from New Brunswick said was that people still like to get employment insurance so they can go hunting and fishing. That is insulting. It is the worst insult that can be thrown at working people. It means that it is not enough to have seasonal work and cut employment insurance, he is even going to criticize us if we go hunting and fishing. He is insulting people who want the benefit of employment insurance.

We live in regions where work is seasonal. We did not choose the place where we came into this world. That is not a choice. Mr. Speaker, you certainly did not choose the place where you came into this world. The people where I come from, whether on the Acadian Peninsula or in the Acadie—Bathurst region, or in the Gaspé or Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island, living along the coastlines, did not choose to come into the world in those places, but they did. And that is part of our country. So is the country united or divided?

There was a time when things were not going all that well in Alberta. It was a time when people were poor, but I am happy for them now that things are going better. When I asked the minister responsible for ACOA for assistance for the Bathurst Airport, for renovations and an extension to the runway for our workers who were going to work in the west, the first thing he said was that rather than work to promote economic development in our region, he would prefer to have an airport that would enable people to go and work elsewhere.

On the one hand, the government is saying that there are jobs across Canada and that people should be mobile and prepared to work elsewhere. On the other hand, when we want to help people go and work elsewhere, the government makes it impossible for us to do so. It is cannot even provide northeastern New Brunswick with an airport.

I do not want people to move elsewhere, but it would at least be useful to those who do so, for Canadians and people from our region who want to go.

Last Friday, I watched Le Téléjournal national with Céline Galipeau. I would like to comment on statements made by Toronto journalist Tasha Kheiriddin. I would like to invite her to come and see us. The people back home are not too fond of her at the moment.

What did Tasha say on TV? She said that people from the Atlantic provinces who worked seasonally ought to know that Canada is a country of immigrants and that since immigrants work anywhere, they should go and work out west.

I do not believe that this journalist understood what she was telling the women back home, the mothers who work in fish plants, because it is not just men. In fact most of the people who work in these plants are women. Should they all hop on a plane to work out west because that is where the jobs are, and leave their children at home? People like that are called 20/10s. They go and work for 20 days and return home for 10 days. Those are the kinds of jobs we have back home.

The NDP motion refers to a five-week black hole. What will the government do in March and April when the employment insurance benefits stop?

The journalist said that the Conservatives had created approximately 900,000 jobs. They did not create them where I live. There are no jobs there. Finding work is difficult. That is why a pilot project has been under way in the regions since 2004 for people with seasonal jobs in places like the Gaspé, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. The five weeks of benefits would see the workers through until the next season.

Paul Robichaud, New Brunswick's Deputy Premier, said that this would hurt the province and employees. He asked the government to backtrack; otherwise the people in question would end up on welfare. However, things can be even worse. If two people who live together work in a fish plant and one is receiving employment insurance benefits or returns to work and the other loses employment insurance benefits, then there is no entitlement to welfare. This will mean total poverty.

And that is why we are asking the minister to consider the harm that the Conservatives are causing to workers. We are asking the Prime Minister to think about what he is doing to our country.

I have already asked in the House what workers have done to the Prime Minister. What have the workers who have built this country done to the Prime Minister to make him hate them so much?

What have they done? They have contributed to an employment insurance fund that belongs to them.

I remember one of the minister's speeches. She said that she wanted Canadians to work 12 months a year. My goodness, if they want people to work 12 months a year, they should invest in our secondary and tertiary processing plants. The government has to help people work. People where I come from are not slackers, nor are they lazy. The Conservatives need to stop investing their money solely in the west. They need to come east.

When we ask for airport repairs, nothing happens. They are in the process of shutting down the rail line between Moncton and Bathurst. All of Atlantic Canada's economic development infrastructure is being shut down. And the Prime Minister is saying that people do not want to work.

ACOA lost $78 million in investment funding. That money could have helped small businesses. But quite the opposite is happening.

Benoît Bouchard, the former Conservative transport minister under Brian Mulroney, said last week on national television that they tried to change employment insurance but that it did not work. The Liberals tried and cut employment insurance benefits, but it did not work. The Conservatives are trying the same thing. They will soon see that it does not work.

Perhaps people were frustrated yesterday to hear me say in the House that the Acadians will not be deported again. But that is how people are feeling. They feel they have to leave home. It is not right that our people should be forced to leave when we have forestry, fishing and tourism industries.

I will finish on that point. Once again, we are asking the government to listen to the people. It should come see what is happening, scrap this reform and start over.

[Business of Supply, February 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the member has been in the House of Commons for a long time now and he knows his region well.

The minister and the parliamentary secretary are telling us that the government did not actually reform employment insurance, it just made clarifications. But the Prime Minister himself has said that employment insurance was reformed.

I have been involved with employment insurance since 1988, and I was elected to the House in 1997. Never before have people had to work for 70% of their salary or travel up to an hour from home. What is more, the board of referees will cease to exist and umpires will be replaced by 38 people.

Does the member feel that this constitutes reform or just clarification?

[Business of Supply, February 5th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I have a simple question for my colleague, who is a member of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities and the employment insurance critic.

The government brought in Bill C-38, an omnibus bill, but it was never debated. In a democracy, if the government wants to reform employment insurance, it would usually consult the people, send the bill to the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, call the stakeholders concerned to appear before the committee—especially those who pay into the employment insurance fund, that is the workers and employers—and sit down together to try to find solutions to the problem. The workers and employers should be encouraged to participate in this process because the employment insurance system does not belong to the government.

We should not take the “my way or the highway” approach to a bill, but that is how this government went about it.

Would it not have been truly democratic to have sent the bill to committee and propose that a national study be conducted?