Mr. Speaker, congratulations to you on your new position in the House. We came into the House together in 1988. I am sure we will get the same kind of wisdom that we saw from you as a member of parliament.
I want to thank the minister. She is obviously living up to the red book promise of introducing the EI legislation very quickly in this new mandate. That is appreciated certainly by myself and my constituents. I know the bill has not been tabled. We have not seen it. I doubt that this is in the bill, but I want to at least put it on the record.
One problem was that the previous bill did not address the boundary issues. I am referring to the disparity between rural Canada and urban Canada, which the Minister of Industry mentioned a couple of days ago in a radio interview. In other words, in bigger centres unemployment is much lower and in rural areas it is much higher, yet these areas are blended together.
It really hurts our seasonal workers. We have spoken with the minister on this before. The minister in her wisdom and the department were generous enough to change the rules. They will be incrementally changed over the next four or five years.
Getting to the point, is there any way we can address these boundary issues in terms of the disparity between urban Canada and rural Canada and seasonal workers in resource backed industries?