Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the member for Gaspé a question as it relates to the gap. That is a very important issue. He has many fishermen in his riding who work different portions of a season and therefore have a gap.
The minister has made it very clear there is some concern in various regions based on that issue. He has signalled to all members of Parliament, especially to one member who spent a lot of time on this issue, the member for Fredericton-York-Sunbury. We call it the Scott proposal because it was made by one of our members.
The proposal is basically structured like this. Instead of allowing those gaps to exist, people on UI would be allowed to go back 26 weeks. In any one of those 26 weeks they would find 12, 14 or 16 weeks in order to qualify for UI.
This proposal has been bounced around by some members as a solution to the gap. So far we have not found anyone except for that member who has done that amount of work on the gap.
I ask the member for Gaspé if he has any proposals or if he thinks the Scott proposal would deal with that problem in regions like his, particularly in industries like the fishing industry where there are significant gaps.
What we are saying is if you needed 12 or 14 weeks to qualify you could go back 26 weeks to find those weeks and it would not matter if there was a gap of 2 weeks in between, and then you found another 4 or 5 weeks.
The interest I have in this is that the minister has signalled that we are looking for solutions to this. I want to make it quite clear to the opposition and the public that there is no intention of throwing the bill out and starting from scratch.
A significant amount of work has been done on this bill. There are a lot of good parts to this bill. There are a few problems we are trying to deal with. One is the gap.
I want to know from the member for Gaspé whether he agrees with the Scott proposal or whether he has one of his own that could help with that problem, which he suggests is one of the reasons we should scrap this legislation presently in front of the House.