Mr. Speaker, I want to expand a bit on something my colleague was talking about, the ratio of eligibility. It seems to me that the Liberals used the EI fund as a cash cow. They created an environment where it was mandatory that everybody pay in, but virtually no one qualified for anything if people were unlucky enough to lose their jobs. The Liberals designed a program where they could actually milk this cash cow for, in the end, 52 billion dollars' worth of surplus, and it is no surprise why it was a surplus. People pay in and pay in with the good faith and optimism that if ever, God forbid, they should become unemployed, they would be eligible for income maintenance.
For the Liberals to use the surplus for anything other than income maintenance I believe was a deceit and a fraud because that money was not even their money. In the mid-1980s, the federal government stopped paying into the EI fund. That fund was strictly the contributions of employers and employees as insurance.
What does the member think of that as an insurance fund? If it were house insurance and people had to pay for it and there was a less than 40% chance of collecting if their house should happen to burn down, what kind of an insurance program would that be?