Thank you very much.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today.
I would like to touch on a general topic before going to more specific questions. My colleagues may find that they have heard this before, since we have already attended several meetings today. The economy is mired in crisis and the first priority for us is to ensure that these billions of dollars find their way into the economy as quickly as possible.
We think there are many things we do not like at all about this budget. You have mentioned some of them. We agree with most of those deficiencies, and we could add more. But for us, the priority has to be to get that money out the door. We think this is what one might call a bad Liberal budget, in the sense that it does provide significant fiscal stimulus. And given the number of people unemployed or losing their jobs or about to, we are going to work to pass the budget. Just an hour or so ago, the minister confirmed that the government would not entertain amendments, even on things that have nothing to do with fiscal stimulus.
I'd like to mention, for example, to Mr. Georgetti and Monsieur Céré....
We agree with you. Mr. Ignatieff has stated on several occasions that helping vulnerable individuals was a top priority. It is hard to find someone who is more vulnerable than an unemployed person.
We would very much have liked to see making it easier to getting access to employment insurance and working very hard to making it take less time to get the cheques out of the door as high priorities, but we're not going to block the budget and bring down the government and cause an election to do that. We'll have to do that at some other time.
Mr. Georgetti, I think we see eye to eye on this, but are you suggesting that is a big enough deficiency that we should defeat the budget?