Mr. Speaker, on January 29, I rose in the House to ask a question about the EI spring gap, which continues to affect thousands of our constituents. For those who need reminding, the spring gap is when close to 16,000 workers go without an income, some of them for over four months, during the off season because of bad EI reforms instituted by Stephen Harper's Conservative government.

During the last campaign, the Prime Minister promised to reverse the Conservatives' reforms, which penalized seasonal workers and their families. Sadly, the reality today is that nothing has been fixed.

For the past few weeks, the Liberals have been boasting left and right that they fixed the spring gap for seasonal workers. The reality on the ground says otherwise. The government should have taken emergency measures to help seasonal workers. Unfortunately, they decided to offload the spring gap problem onto the provinces. The result is that unemployed workers in eastern Quebec are knocking on doors only to be told that programs do not exist. They are ending up broke and in debt. Is that what the Liberals call fixing the problem?

The Liberals got themselves elected on the promise of fixing the spring gap, so when are they actually going to do it? We can only wonder.

On the ground, groups of unemployed people are worried and rightly so. Last week, Gaétan Cousineau, spokesperson for the Mouvement action chômage Pabok, said that the unemployed in the Magdalen Islands went to their local employment centre to access these measures. They learned that no measure was available because not enough people had signed up. The Minister of National Revenue and hon. member for Gaspésie—les Îles-de-la-Madeleine said that her government had finally fixed the spring gap. In the Lower St. Lawrence, there is currently no program in place and victims of the spring gap are directed to the welfare office. Imagine that.

These people do not need welfare, they need financial support before they resume working. Again, it is the jobs that are seasonal, not the workers. Alain Lagacé, coordinator at Action chômage Kamouraska, said, and I quote, “[The Prime Minister] was elected in eastern Canada on a promise to fix the spring gap. In 35 years as an advocate for the unemployed, I have never seen things so bad. Workers in the Lower St. Lawrence feel like the Liberals are leaving them high and dry.”

MASSE, the Mouvement autonome et solidaire des sans-emploi, condemns this situation, and so do we. Simple solutions are available, such as emergency financial assistance for victims of the spring gap, reducing the employment insurance eligibility period to 350 or 360 hours, and providing at least 35 weeks of benefits. Every year, the EI spring gap affects seasonal workers and their families, yet no government, be it Conservative or Liberal, has seen fit to truly reform employment insurance. Unions, groups advocating for unemployed workers, and the NDP have been calling the government's attention to the need for a massive EI overhaul that accounts for the realities of seasonal work. This has been going on for way too long, but so far, nobody seems to be listening to us.

The NDP fully supports the workers and unions who are fighting to get the Liberal government to introduce functional emergency measures to address the situation. Words are no longer enough. It is time for action, time to find a practical, sustainable solution for our 16,000 seasonal workers.

Brigitte Sansoucy

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Adjournment Proceedings

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