Mr. Speaker, since the hon. member for Avalon is relatively new to the House, I may need to repeat myself since he did not seem to hear the answers I gave to his colleague's questions a few moments ago.
I am sorry I need to deal with this the odd time when I deal with members from the Liberal Party but since they are Liberals, I will try to speak slowly and distinctly so I can get the message across.
We inherited the existing EI program from the Liberal Party. Any time I hear the Liberals complaining about the provisions contained in the EI program, it was their program to begin with. If what the hon. member for Avalon said is true, why did his own party not address those very fundamental issues when it had 13 years to do it? It made no progress whatsoever.
When we took office prior to the 2008 election, we held widespread consultations with Canadians from coast to coast to coast looking for ways to improve on the EI system. We knew at that time that Canada and the rest of the world were facing a global economic crisis, a recession, a slowdown, the likes of which we had never seen before. We recognized that we needed to make some significant changes to the EI program to deal with the problems facing the country. What did we do? We started a consultation process.
Again, if we were to contrast that to what the Liberals would do, they would bring in programs without any consultation with stakeholders. That is not the approach the Conservative Party and our government takes.
What we heard during those consultations were three very basic elements. The first thing we heard was that we should extend the benefit period from 45 weeks to a longer period. During consultations, some of the opposition members suggested that we extend it by two weeks but we did more than double that. We extended the EI benefit period by 5 weeks, from 45 to 50 weeks.
The second thing we heard during consultations was that we needed to put more money into skills upgrading and job training. For those unfortunate souls who have lost their job and need to retrain, we decided to add $1.5 billion to increase job training and skills upgrading programs already in existence. That means that over $1 billion in new money is available for those people on EI to upgrade their skills and perhaps find a new craft so they can get back into the workplace as quickly as possible. Not only did we put $1 billion into the EI fund for training, we allocated $500 million for those people who did not qualify for EI so they could receive job training and skills upgrading.
Finally, we heard that we needed to do something about our job share program so we did. This program has allowed over 100,000 people to retain their jobs and the employers to keep employing these people. We extended the work share program by 14 weeks to 52 weeks.
Those are just a few of the improvements we made to the existing program, one that we inherited from the Liberals.
I would suggest to the hon. member for Avalon to please not complain about the program that his party developed and we improved upon.