Mr. Speaker, I spoke today on the EI bill, Bill C-44, which is quite clearly a vote buying piece of legislation when we look at what the government is really doing, which is practically nothing compared to the suffering of people who have been affected by the Liberal government's 1996 cuts to unemployment insurance.
I know I only have four minutes so I will never get to everything that I want to say, but before I go into that it is important to look back at why I am a member of parliament in the House of Commons today and to look at what really happened.
In 1993 the Liberal government campaigned that it would be helping workers in rural Canada, that it would be helping to develop those regions and would make life easier for those people, like the Prime Minister said when he campaigned in Beauséjour and told seasonal workers that they were not being treated fairly in those days. Surprise, surprise. I wonder what happened once he got elected.
Once the Prime Minister was elected he introduced all kinds of legislation in the House. The bill that was absolutely unacceptable was the one regarding the unemployment insurance program. I am sure there are Liberal members on the other side who do not agree with what took place in 1996, but they were silent then. At the time in Atlantic Canada 31 out of 32 MPs were Liberal MPs. With 31 MPs on the government side, the government was able to pass a piece of legislation that out of the whole country most affected Atlantic Canadians. The 31 MPs were totally silent. They closed their eyes and supported their government. They did not care about the people of Atlantic Canada.
I started to listen to what was happening. I thought, there is something wrong here. We have an elected member of parliament on the government side. He is there. He has been an elected member for a long time. He actually stepped down and gave his place to the Prime Minister. The riding voted for him and gave him a one way ticket to Ottawa. I thought, why are those same people being punished for electing the Prime Minister and giving him his one way ticket to Ottawa.
I started questioning the MP. I asked him if he were not concerned. He indicated that they were abusing the system and that the system would have to be changed because there was too much abuse. He was saying this about the same people who were voting for him. I walked out of his office and I thought, my God, I have been voting for the wrong man all this time. He has no interest in defending my interests and the interests of the riding.
That is when I got involved and started to have public meetings. I organized coalitions. I told people that we had a problem, that we had elected a member of parliament whose sole interest in government was self-interest and that was it. I am not saying every member of the government is bad, because I know there are very nice people on that side, but he was our member of parliament and he should have been defending our interests and that did not happen.
What happened on June 2, 1999? The people asked me to run because actually I had been representing them for the last three years. Too many people were suffering and they asked me to run. I was a seasonal worker and I was going to run in an election. I could not imagine it would happen.
I am sure my time is almost over, but what I want to say is that people in Atlantic Canada are tired. They are not for sale. The bill will not buy their votes. They voiced their opinion on June 2, 1999. I will make sure that Atlantic Canadians, people from Beauséjour—Petitcodiac, be they from Albert county, Kent county or Westmorland, remember what the Liberals did to them in 1996.