No, I'm not dying to get in, and I hope I'll survive it.
The first thing, of course, is that in order to find a job you need resources. You need...[Technical Difficulty--Editor]...to pay for your phone bill. You need to be able to go to the public library to get access to the Internet to find out what's available. You need to be able to buy the local newspaper.
If you're out of EI benefits, and if you're in a situation where you're not quite eligible for social assistance in your province, what kinds of resources can you put into looking for a job today?
We're really worried about a lot of Canadians right now who are exhausting their benefits. We've been to communities and we've talked to workers through our research projects and our ongoing activities. When we say to them, okay, you're unemployed, and we ask them what happened, they say every time that they were forced to collect EI. That's the first thing. The second thing they do is ask what they are going to do after that, because there are no jobs in their communities.
I was in Miramichi last summer, where the manufacturing base has been destroyed. There were four or five major plants. One of the largest pulp and paper mills is being completely demolished right now. Three thousand jobs have disappeared in that community. People know they're going to run out of benefits. They know there are no jobs in town or in the province. Going to Alberta is no longer the option it used to be.
What are we going to do for them? The extended benefits they're entitled to because of the reforms that have been put in place are going to run out as well. They're not going to have the resources to look for jobs.
One of the things we've been saying about how to rebuild is that we need an industrial policy. How do we create the next jobs? Where do we create them? Can we achieve that? We have ideas. We know what to do.
There are ideas being proposed in that community right now. One is how to use the resources there to restart something, to transform the local resources into energy, for instance. There are proposals on the table, but they're not being examined because there's no industrial strategy.
There are other things that we've proposed, such as procurement policies that would initiate jobs in Canada, and green policies that would create jobs today and provide a better, greener economy in the future.
So there are ideas out there. We just need to move forward and implement them.
