Mr. Speaker, it is a tragic number. There are over 1.5 million people in Canada today who are out of work. There are social costs in being out of work. It is not just the financial costs, it is the lack of self-respect, the lack of self-worth experienced when people are unable to get that job. I know very closely from personal experience that the sense of self-worth and self-confidence really starts to go.
At the same time, while certainly there may not be hundreds of thousands, there are many thousands. We all remember the UIC ski team. We all know of circumstances in which people are
using the system. The system allows itself to be used that way and people are not stupid.
If our largesse has the built-in ability for people to use it, it also has the built-in ability for people to abuse it and unfortunately we have become for one reason or another a nation that does not look askance at people who abuse the system.
If people cheated on their taxes they were considered to be criminals. Every day now people are avoiding taxes, the GST. People are using the unemployment insurance or other welfare entitlement programs and feel they are entitled to them.
I think we have really lost something in our country when we became a nation of entitlements or benefits or rights rather than responsibilities.
I think the germ of the same thing is there that we as a nation have forgotten the fact that we are a people with responsibility to the nation. Every word we ever hear is about the rights that we as individuals have from the nation. We have to turn that around somewhere and I think it starts right here in this House.