Mr. Speaker, perhaps the member can justify the loss, just this year alone, of 55,000 manufacturing jobs, jobs that pay good wages, that have benefits associated with them, replaced by part time jobs, by low paying jobs with no benefits. That is not the kind of healthy economy that we in this corner anticipate or look forward to, or think Canadians want to participate in.
I would encourage him to maybe drop down to Oshawa and give that answer, or to Windsor and give that answer, or to come to Vancouver Island, where folks in the forestry industry are being laid off and are not being eligible for employment insurance benefits, or find that they run out after a very short period of time. He should try that answer in those communities and see what kind of feedback he gets.
Those are the people whom we are concerned about here and we want to make sure that Canadians have well paying jobs that have benefits. We want to make sure that Canadians are eligible for employment insurance, a program that over the last few years governments have taken billions of dollars out of and not put into benefit programs. In fact, governments have kept cutting back on the EI program. Indeed, some of us believe that some of the progress that was made on the deficit and the debt was made on the backs of workers who contributed to the EI program.
We need a program that actually assists people who are out of work in this country. EI used to be that kind of program. Sadly, it has been gutted and it is only a shadow of its former self.