Mr. Speaker, I find this quite incredible. Whenever I think of spending money, even out of my office budget, I always think, “What about those people in my riding who work as hard as they do, then have taxes on top of all of their other bills and are having trouble making ends meet? Should I really be spending their money this way?” Yet here we have the parliamentary secretary who just flippantly says, “Yes, we spent $1.2 million on the CFL”.
The fact of the matter is that no one looked at an ad in the CFL in order to find out where to go to collect unemployment insurance benefits, or employment insurance benefits, as they are now inappropriately called. Nobody got information directly on instructions to do this or that because of the government making an announcement. It is in every instance just a case of feel good, it really is.
The parliamentary secretary should take back the message to the minister that he ought to fix that part of it and stop wasting millions of Canadian taxpayers' dollars.