Mr. Speaker, on March 18, 1994, I put a question to the Deputy Prime Minister concerning her sensitivity to the plight of the unemployed.
I realized how powerless the Deputy Prime Minister was in the face of the unemployment problem. Since then, I have also come to realize how powerless the Minister of Finance is and how he has failed to take any action to address the situation. In the words of Mr. Laurent Laplante, a respected journalist, "by focusing all of their efforts on wrestling the inflation monster to the ground, the Conservatives ended up dragging the country into the first ever made-in-Canada recession. Mr. Martin has decided to go one step further and make the recession permanent."
As a complement to the question I am going to ask, and to which the minister did not really answer, I would like to echo the voice of that young engineer who stunned everyone at the seminar on employment, a few days ago, when he said that he had a master's degree in a very specialized field and nobody was able to find him a job. This sort of broke the empty rhetoric usually heard at such gatherings.
I would like to know whether or not the government has a job creation strategy based on some government action, and really established as a primary objective of the government. At the present time, we only see some sprinkling here and there. The infrastructure program will create almost no jobs for women and, anyway, it is just a drop in the unemployment bucket. There are no programs for specific groups either.
Was anything announced for unskilled workers? What do we have for graduates in various trades, technologists or university graduates? Is there anything specific to ensure the recovery of entrepreurship in Quebec and Canada?
I would like the government to finally give us some answers on this and really get to work instead of riding the wave as far as job creation is concerned.