You can sympathize with our situation in trying to see where the stimulus money is really creating direct jobs. Again, we were asked to buy a pig in a poke. We were asked to sign a blank cheque essentially with this vote 35 and its almost unprecedented urgency. The House leaders were called together for a late night meeting, an all-party emergency meeting. The minister, the President of the Treasury Board, the Minister of Finance's people were there, and the PMO, PCO. This had to happen because we had to get dollars on the streets and money in people's pockets.
If you would just change the eligibility rules for EI, a lot more people would qualify and a lot of people would at least be spending money that they currently don't have.
I don't see the concrete measures here. I see lots of very virtuous, long-range human resources planning, but that is no consolation for the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs that are being lost, etc., nor does it get money spent and re-spent. We would have been better off just handing everybody a $1,000 bill. Well, no, it's only Karlheinz Schreiber who uses $1,000 bills, but even George Bush just sent everybody a cheque for $600, right? That would in fact get money into the economy and be spent a lot faster than through a lot of the plans that you're bringing to us here today.