Thank you for your question, Mr. Ste‑Marie.

The employment insurance scheme was essentially torn down in the 1990s and we are still living with that; we are stuck with it. The scheme was locked down.

One of the first things that must be fixed is eligibility. This is about the number of hours that must be accumulated in order to be eligible for employment insurance. Whether it is 420 or 700 or 900 or 1,200 hours, it is not a problem for someone who works full-time and has a permanent job. However, it is a problem for the third of the working population, the 7 million working men and women, who have part-time, contract, on-call, seasonal or split-shift jobs. They include professors and nurses who work on call, who are not yet permanent and are having trouble accumulating the time worked that they need in order to be eligible for employment insurance when periods of unemployment occur. The eligibility question must be resolved.

When we talk about eligibility, we are also talking about the penalties provided that relate to the reasons for termination of employment. Since 1993–1996, a succession of governments have imposed the extreme penalty: that for the reference period, the year preceding an employment insurance claim, there will be an analysis, an investigation, of all records of employment. In that period, if there is a voluntary departure that is defined as unjustified or a dismissal defined as attributable to misconduct, that record of employment—and everything that went before it—goes into the trash can.

I will give you an example. We recently defended an actuary who was working full-time and lost his employment as a result of a reorganization. In addition to that work, he had a little part-time job on Saturdays from which he had been dismissed two months earlier. He was found to have been dismissed for misconduct and so, from that date forward, everything was thrown out. All he was left with was two months of work, so he was not eligible for employment insurance. There is something messed up about the employment insurance scheme, something that is not working and is extremely punitive.

There are other specific subjects that are in need of intervention. For seasonal workers, the problem exists both upstream and downstream. Upstream, the problem lies in the difficulty of accumulating enough hours of work to be eligible. In some regions of Quebec and the rest of Canada, and in certain areas and administrative regions, the dominant type of employment is seasonal employment. It can be hard to manage to accumulate the working time needed in order to obtain benefit periods, which are much too short. Do you know how many weeks of benefits someone who has accumulated 900 hours of work is given? They are given 16 weeks, which is not even four months.

Downstream, the problem is how to get through the winter. Seasonal workers often work in the spring, summer and fall, and they have to be able to get through the winter. When February comes, they no longer receive employment insurance. This is what we call the black hole.

There are parents, especially women, who lose their jobs during maternity or parental leave, and this accounts for several thousand people across Canada. They find themselves with nothing, because they have exhausted their benefits bank. They may not exceed their bank of special leave, sick leave, and so on.

This scheme includes a host of measures where a bit more justice needs to be restored; I would simply say a bit more balance. In so doing, we will get a scheme that provides working men and women with more protection. We understand that a period of unemployment may be shorter or longer, depending on the job market. Right now, there are jobs, and so benefit periods are shorter. They go together. Unemployment and jobs are two sides of the same coin, and that is one of the facts of life in the labour market.

I would conclude with this image: that an unemployed person is first and foremost a worker, someone who was working and will start working again. That is how it has to be understood. That is why we need structuring measures in the employment insurance scheme to help people when they find themselves between jobs.

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