Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Outremont is wrong; I did not utter a word during his presentation, but I will speak now. I wonder on what planet the hon. member lives.
We have 800,000 people on welfare in Quebec today, and there are 1.2 million in Ontario. Quebec sovereignists are certainly not responsible for that; the federal system is. One of the main reasons for this state of affairs is the manpower issue. The very brother of the hon. member for Brome-Missisquoi, a minister in the Johnson government and now the member for
Westmount-Saint-Henri, was among the government members who asked that the issue of manpower be returned to Quebec.
These are not sovereignists, but federalists, people who have realized that, if we want our manpower to be trained adequately, training has to be provided in an acceptable regime. The facts contradict what the hon. member for Outremont said. At present, the public cannot find its way around the 27 federal and 25 provincial programs available.
As for concrete measures, the federal government recently announced that only UI recipients will have access to job search clubs from now on. A fine move to create a single window no doubt. And so logical.
I would like to tell the hon. member for Outremont a thing or two about the real world, through you of course, Mr. Speaker. In our regions, many workers are unskilled and need adequate training. We are talking about regional development. Well, I come from Quebec's eastern region, which could be called the stumbling block of federalism.
The federal government tried all kinds of things in our region, this in addition to Quebec's initiatives. Today, our region has the strongest migration movement. That trend, which started 30 years ago, is the result of your actions.
I want to say a word about the FORDQ. I agree with the member for Outremont: you did turn that office into an empty structure. This is obvious. All the investment budgets targeted for small businesses were cut. Businesses employing only a few people do not need to have access to the international markets. Quite often, they simply need a little help to build a warehouse, etc., but you let them down. One of the reasons is that federal Liberals from Quebec did not speak up. They let the Minister of Industry do his dirty deed, so that Ontario would regain control.
I will conclude with a question on the Human Resources Investment Fund. Instead of creating an artificial fund and using the money contributed by employers and employees to interfere in Quebec's fields of jurisdiction, why did you not reduce the contributions of employers and employees? That way, you would have put the money directly in the industry, in the workplace, instead of spending it on the bureaucracy, and you would have achieved true job creation, instead of making systematic cuts.