Mr. Speaker, the minister's own budgetary plan says that, as a result of legislative amendments contained in Bill C-17 which reduced the maximum number of weeks of entitlement, there has been a 16.2 per cent decrease in the number of recipients.
Will the Minister of Human Resources Development acknowledge that this situation will only continue to deteriorate in the next three years because of the cuts in transfer payments and the implementation of the Canada social transfer, which is nothing less than a veiled attempt to cut federal funding for social programs even more?