Mr. Speaker, I extend my personal congratulations and thanks to you in recognition of your appointment to the chair.
I also wish to thank the great people of Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore in Nova Scotia for giving me the honour of being their representative twice in a row.
I have a question for my hon. colleague from New Brunswick, who lives in a very beautiful part of the world. An awful lot of people were hurt by the EI changes, not only working people but small business people. We all know that if a business were to go into a certain community and say that it would drop $20 million there, both federal and provincial governments would bend over backwards to do anything they could to get that business in there. Yet communities like Saint John, New Brunswick, or St. John's, Newfoundland, had almost $100 million ripped out of the local economies because of the changes to EI. It meant devastation for small business, families and workers in those areas.
Could the hon. member please elaborate on why the Liberal government would take away that money from those hard working people and then give it away in tax breaks for major corporations?