Mr. Speaker, when the motion by the member for Markham—Unionville came before us today, I was quite struck by it. During the 1990s, I was part of a group of people in Hamilton who were very concerned with the changes taking place in our government.
Members will recall in the mid-1990s the Canada health and social transfer was changed in a fashion that caused government transfers to be less to provinces and the ripple effect that went through our economy when those provinces started downloading their responsibilities to the municipalities at a great cost to them. At the same time we saw unemployment insurance change to EI. In the days where some 80% of workers received benefits, it was reduced.
Would it not be reasonable to expect any government, which has a $2 billion surplus in EI funds, not to apply those to general revenues but to put them, instead, into retraining for workers, especially those workers sold out by this softwood sellout?