Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the leader of the Bloc Quebecois for his question.
Naturally, I share his sentiments about storm victims and I would like to tell him that the Government of Canada, including the Minister of National Defence and all my other colleagues, did everything it could to help resolve the problems.
I would like to be very clear, and I thank him for giving me an opportunity to do so today. There is confusion between qualifying period and waiting period. What we did as a government, and I used the powers accorded me by the legislation in these exceptional circumstances, was to eliminate the two-week waiting period so that people could receive EI payments much more quickly, but I maintained the qualifying period. The qualifying period remains, and I think it important that it remain.