Maybe our analysts could find out the cost through human resources. This has been beaten left and right and pounded on for so many years. When we look at the 360 hours.... I believe the costing was already done, and it's less than $1 billion. I think it's around $300 million per year. It was already done in the past. I don't have the number with me here today, but I believe it would be easy to find.
When you're talking about the increase for the numbers of hours that could happen, we have to remember where we came from. We used to have only 15 hours a week and 150 hours. The only thing that I know, that I believe, is that the increase that happened is that the government has put $57 billion in the general fund. Nobody seems to be worried about that. I didn't hear anybody screaming over that--taking the money, not from the taxpayer.... And there's a difference.
For the taxpayers, the people who go in and work in the morning, get their paycheques, there's the gross on their paycheque. Then there's CPP for when they take retirement, so they'll have a little pension plan. One is called employment insurance, and that one is so when you lose your job, you'll get something. That's what it means. Then you have income tax. The income tax is to pay for everything that we collectively want--hospitals, education, etc. And for the debt, they call it the GST. They created the GST to pay the debt. It seems to me that the debt could not be paid with the GST, so now we're going to steal from workers, because the workers cannot defend themselves.
What I'm saying is that if we feel that the cost could come up, the only way to resolve that is by creating jobs. New Brunswick alone lost $270 million per year in benefits for employment insurance. For the labour market, they have put in $100 million per year for training programs. So there's $170 million that just went to the general fund that maybe could have created jobs.