Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question. It is the kind of question that I was hoping the Conservatives would ask or maybe make a speech about. Everybody knows that in resource based communities, for every one job in the primary sector, there are three or four jobs in the support or service sector. The member is absolutely right when she says that when one of those jobs goes, those other jobs go as well. People then are left behind. They have no work or they have to leave town and leave their families behind, who then live in poverty.
We used to have a social safety net in this country. We used to have employment insurance that worked for people. We used to have social welfare that actually worked for people, but the incursion of this very cold right wing wind that has come into Canada and Ontario over the last 10 or 15 years has made it such that the safety net has been rent asunder. It is not there any more.
Only about 15% or 20% of people who have paid into EI all their lives now qualify for EI when it is their turn to collect for a little while when they are in between jobs. EI is not there. As well, in just the last couple of weeks, the government cut literacy programs, which would have been helpful for these workers as they try to shift gears and get into other work.
As for welfare, in 1995 Mike Harris cut welfare by 21.6% for the poorest of our families and our most at risk and marginalized citizens.
Let us put all of that together: this terrible agreement, plus the impact when plants close and people lose their jobs, plus the multiplier effect with the fact that we no longer have the social safety net that all of us worked so hard to put in place. Then we begin to understand the devastation and the poverty that now exist and will continue to exist.