Mr. Speaker, I want to say that I will be sharing my time with the member for Elgin—Middlesex—London. This vibrant, young colleague represents the up-and-coming generation of young women we are very proud to have within our caucus, and we are proud of all the young men and women who joined our party and were voted in during the last election.
Today is an opportunity for us to reaffirm the importance of employment insurance. EI is an important tool for workers who unfortunately lose their jobs. Job loss is a reality of the job market, and we have a system to mitigate the damage of losing one's job. For example, I am thinking about young families dealing with job loss. Employment insurance is there in these situations.
Our government worked over the past decade to strengthen the system, especially for the most vulnerable. Extra benefits were added for people who experience health or legal problems, for example. We always worked to improve the EI system, and we are open to more improvements. I will add that I was an EI recipient more than 20 years ago, and I appreciated it at the time. We had young children, and EI helped us make ends meet.
The New Democrats are unfortunately on the wrong track today. They have moved a motion that contains falsehoods, but most importantly, these reforms would take us in the wrong direction. Reforms should aim to give the unemployed more opportunities to earn more income, not make them poorer. Unfortunately, that is what this New Democrat motion proposes. It proposes unproductive, ineffective, and costly measures, and it also contains some falsehoods, which I will talk about later.
Basically, what the New Democrats want is to let people work for two months and collect benefits for a year. We all know that employment insurance benefits amount to a fraction of the income recipients earned previously, so that could limit workers to a lower income for a longer period of time. The point of employment insurance is to give people a decent income while they are unemployed, but it is also to encourage people to get back into the job market.
I should also point out that these measures would be costly. As we all know, the money in the fund comes from employers and employees. This plan would put a lot of pressure on everyone. Some estimate that the New Democrats' unrealistic proposal could cost as much as an extra $4 billion. For one thing, companies need all of their resources to invest in productivity and compete on the international market. For another, employees would have to contribute more to pay for a costly, ineffective measure that would wind up making them poorer.
Benoît Bouchard, a former Conservative minister, clearly explained and defended this position some time ago, in 2009, on Le Club des Ex, a program I was on with my friend Simon Durivage. Benoît Bouchard said that we could not have a standard threshold of 360 hours for employment insurance eligibility. We would be paying for it for years because when the economy recovered we would return to a period of normal employment.
This measure was brought forward in the midst of an economic crisis. What happened 20 years ago will happen again. People will work nine weeks, go on unemployment, and receive benefits for 50 weeks.
Mr. Bouchard also said that is why Claude Forget, in his 1986 report, stated that the unemployment insurance program had to stop competing with employment.
Therefore, I will repeat that the EI program must stop competing with employment. I am privileged to come from a region where the entrepreneurial spirit is phenomenal.
We just came out of an election campaign. In Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, we have been dealing with a shortage of skilled labour for about 10 years now. I have met business owners who have had to make the difficult decision of investing south of the border sometimes because they cannot find skilled workers at home. This has happened in Sainte-Justine, for example. This slows economic growth and the growth of our communities.
This government seems unusually preoccupied with large urban centres, and yet the regions are the economic backbone of our country. The manufacturing and agricultural sectors are important, and they play a critical role in the regions. Those businesses could use a boost from the government. They are having a hard time finding skilled labour.
The measure proposed by the NDP here today would shrink the potential labour pool even further. Jobs in the regions are often very well paid. Those jobs pay people enough to raise a family and live decently. That is the reality in Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, the reality that I faced during the economic crisis and during the reform that our government brought in.
I want to come back to what the hon. member for Jonquière said this morning. She said that seasonal workers, more specifically those who work at golf courses, do not have jobs in the winter. She suggested that the reform therefore had an impact. I attended meetings where the Lac-Etchemin golf club said it was hard to retain its skilled workers from one season to the next to maintain and develop the course. The general manager of the Mont-Orignal ski hill was in the room at the time. Needless to say, a logical connection was made between those two businesses. The workers can work for the golf course in the summer and the ski hill in the winter. Their earnings are therefore much higher than what they would have received in employment insurance benefits. It is a win-win situation for everyone. More money ends up in the workers' pockets. There is also more opportunity to create jobs to address the labour shortages in the region. This in turn leads to more economic activity. Obviously, Mont-Orignal would need a bit of snow, but this winter we are not so fortunate.
I am quickly running out of time, and I just barely touched on the first point that I wanted to raise, that of reform. Of course, it is important to point out that the money belongs to workers, to employees, and I hope that the government will confirm that. The government cannot dip into that fund.
I would like to remind members that our Conservative government paid off all the deficits and helped workers and employees. The government injected over $10 billion into the employment insurance fund to compensate for the economic crisis. It is because of our policies and the 1.3 million jobs that we created that there is now a surplus in the employment insurance fund. The best remedy for unemployment is job creation. We hope that the government will make that a priority.
I will end now by saying that improvements could be made. For example, I am thinking of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, an independent, bilingual, non-profit organization in Canada that makes recommendations. People like Michel Bédard and Pierre Fortin work with that organization. The NDP's recommendation is not consistent with those made by credible organizations that have shown what EI reforms should look like.
In closing, the best remedy for unemployment is job creation. Unfortunately, that is not what the NDP is proposing today. I therefore do not intend to support the motion.
