Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his question and I welcome him into his new role. I want to say with all humility that if I were able to answer that question I probably would be in a place other than this and it would be a lot higher up than this altitude.
I have just come back from the OECD where countries like the United Kingdom, France and Italy wondered about the very same question. We in Canada are faced with a rate of unemployment of 9.6 per cent. It is far too high. We all agree on that. Other countries in the G-7 for example suffer from higher rates of unemployment and are faced with even greater challenges as they try to respond to the global environment we all have to operate in.
We must all work together. I want to give credit to the provinces as well as the Minister of Finance. The direction we are going in Canada has certainly taken us to a point where we can now say that we have reduced the unemployment rate by some 2 per cent or more in the last couple of years. We still have a long way to go but unlike a lot of other countries, we are going in the right direction.