Mr. Speaker, I agree with the comments made by my colleague, and I would like to provide him with an example.
People who work all of the time and never experience any periods of unemployment may forget that there are people who are unemployed. We are living in difficult times. People in the airline industry have become unemployed. All of a sudden they have realized what that means, that in the end, they will receive benefits for 35, 40 or a maximum of 45 weeks, when they have been contributing for 10, 12 or 15 years.
They have also realized just how much this misappropriation of the EI fund we have been talking about will have an impact on them. They have realized that they were making contributions for a program that, instead of being put toward benefits, were being used to eliminate the government's deficit. This is happening across Canada.
What angers people the most, generally in all parts of the population, is that the $42.8 billion surplus, which the EI fund will have accumulated by year's end from employers' and employees' contributions, will not be put toward the EI program. What is even worse is that the government could have predicted this recession. It did not, and it spent all of this money.
So who is paying the price for this mistake today? Not the federal government, but the people who contributed to the program and who need this money during this recessionary period. It is appalling and it is unacceptable.
We lowered taxes.