Madam Speaker, I welcome this opportunity, as the Official Opposition critic for Training and Youth, to question my counterpart, the Secretary of State (Training and Youth). As a courtesy, I had agreed to change my speaking schedule, and I am not sure this will suit the hon. member opposite, because she has given me a golden opportunity to talk about the Youth Service Corps which was the subject of the first part of her speech. I will start with a comment and then ask a few questions.
The employment and learning strategy includes the Youth Service Corps, but I would like to point out that this year, only 2,500 young people across Canada will be able to take advantage of this initiative, while we have 400,000 young people across
Canada who are unemployed. It depends on the age group, because if we look at the 16 to 30 group, as we do in Quebec, we could say there are 600,000 young people who are unemployed.
So 2,500 does not have much impact. When we realize that of the $10,000 spent on each young person in the Youth Service Corps, about $4,000 goes to administration, there is only 6,000 left. It all depends. There are some variants in the pilot projects, and incidentally, in Quebec, pilot projects tend to be found in Liberal ridings, in most cases, although in Laval, there are two Bloc ridings and one Liberal-