Mr. Speaker, I sit back and listen to the debate in the House. I listen to what Bloc is telling us and what it is saying about the government's unemployment insurance program. I have a much more fundamental question that needs to be asked. Why is the Bloc not asking the government why it is not creating more jobs? We go on nattering
about why one province does not have more of this jurisdiction and we lose sight of the big picture.
It is totally unacceptable that we continue to debate these five points and we forget why the people in Canada in the last election tried to put in place a government they thought would create jobs.
For two years it has been going on and on and has not done a thing. Why is the Bloc not asking the government about some kind of job creation strategy. How many jobs are being created by this? How many jobs are being destroyed by the unemployment insurance program?
The auditor general has said the unemployment rate is one and a half per cent to three per cent higher than it should be because of what the government is doing. It does not make the changes. Why is the Bloc not targeting that problem?
Instead we go on about other things. We have some simple cosmetic changes that have been made like how many jobs does changing the name from unemployment to employment insurance create? Not one. In fact it destroys jobs because we now have to raise taxes. We have to do all these name changes on all the buildings, on all the letterhead and all this kind of thing. That extra tax will destroy more jobs.
We are not addressing the fundamental problem of why we have such a high unemployment rate. We are being taxed to death and the government is using the unemployment insurance system as simply another tax to run some of its favourite programs.
Those are the fundamental questions that should be asked. The Bloc should be asking those questions if it wants to claim to be official opposition in the House.