It's an extremely difficult issue. We need to have a positive environment for jobs.
We have taken a major step on employment insurance by extending the period to five weeks. As you know, Mr. Laforest, we have very big challenges in the forestry sector and the automotive sector, just to take two large sectors of the economy. The key thing here is to acknowledge that these sectors are going to be smaller. They will survive, but they will be smaller.
How do we help people who work in those sectors? They need to be retrained. It's much more important that we put the money into training and a longer period of entitlement to employment insurance so people can be retrained. We're putting more money, through the knowledge infrastructure program in the budget, into our community colleges and universities to help people retrain. This is looking a little down the road, so we are actually helping people get into the position where they can support their families.
On job creation, if I use the formula used by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, about 132,000 jobs will be created over time by the stimulus. We have 120,000 people, as of May alone, participating in the work share process. Many of those folks would not be able to maintain their jobs, and their employers wouldn't be able to maintain their jobs, were it not for the work share program. These are significant initiatives.