Mr. Speaker, the new buzzword is employment. Unemployment has gone away. This must be to hide behind the fact that the whole concept of jobs, jobs, jobs has failed and people are still unemployed.
It would be wonderful if all the people who thought they would get jobs and voted for the Liberal Party because it promised them jobs had employment. However they do not and it is unemployment insurance we are talking about. It does not matter how they want to dress it up.
I am glad the member recognized that perhaps our UI programs have been a disincentive and have hurt our competitiveness around the world.
We are debating a motion put forward by the Bloc from the province of Quebec. I remember reading an article some months ago about MIL shipyards in the province of Quebec unfortunately running out of ships to build. The average wage in the shipyards was $34 an hour. They were not competitive and could not get any more orders. They wanted the federal government to give them some work, to build more ferries that we really did not need, until such time as they could re-engineer the productivity of the factory to allow them to break into the international shipbuilding market.
MIL Davie did not have a hope of breaking into the international shipbuilding market because it was paying its workers $34 an hour. They are now out of work. Where are they? They are part of the package of unemployed people the minister of human resources is trying to help.
We have to provide incentives at the managerial level in the workforce. I did not say anything about devolution in this situation. I said we should put the incentives where they can be managed, at the managerial level of the workforce. I also gave a proposition on how we could look at it. I was surprised and disappointed that the member continued to hang on to the idea of centralist decision making: one shoe fits all; the people in the big wide world are incapable of making any decisions for themselves; it has to be done here in Ottawa. As a businessman I would have thought he would have realized that there is a great benefit in giving people control over their own lives and control over their own decisions. The whole government is missing that opportunity time, time and time again.
That is the unfortunate truth and that is why we are in a mess.