Mr. Speaker, the minister speaks a good game, but she must be disappointed with the complete lack of support that she has been receiving from her cabinet colleagues. She must be disappointed that the tools she needs to accomplish what she professes have been eliminated, reduced and slashed.
She talks about the retraining of seasonally unemployed elderly workers, in most cases workers that are 55 to 65 years of age. Three months into the fiscal year in my riding there was no money for the retraining of those people. Some of them, we recognize, need basic skills before they can reintegrate into new professions or new jobs. Literacy programs, the most important and the basic fundamental building block to learning a trade, have been removed and slashed.
If the Conservatives want to do research in the rural part of this country, where most of the seasonally unemployed are, they cannot even go to a CAP site in the future because it has been eliminated. That is how people were able to do their own training. That is how they were able to do job searches. That is how they continued their education. No more now. They can go to the University of Calgary or somewhere else if they leave East Pubnico, but if they are going to be in western rural parts of the country, the minister should be ashamed of her cabinet colleagues. She should fight a lot harder for people who need the assistance of the government.