Mr. Speaker, I cannot stand to listen to someone talk about an insurance program as a handout. We paid into it. That is ours. That is the workers of this country. They were sold out by the Liberals in the mid-1990s when the Liberals changed it from unemployment insurance and called it EI, dressed it up as a nice looking horse, but it still was a pig in a poke as far as the workers of this country were concerned. Then they stole the money year in and year out from the workers of this country, the people who need it.
The end result of that was at the municipal level people went on welfare. What the Liberals were doing was a scam. It was a shell game. They moved off of income and put it on to property tax. They said that somehow they were cutting out the taxation of our country. That is typical of the Liberals.
To have the member stand in the House and say that employment insurance which people work for is a handout is insulting to the people of Canada.