Mr. Speaker, I want to compliment my hon. colleague from Hamilton East—Stoney Creek. Members may not know this but the hon. member is the former president of the Hamilton and District Labour Council and was the longest serving president of the council. Therefore, the member has a reputation and a track record for standing up for working people. It is a perfect segue to take a member like him directly from the labour movement, elect him to the floor of the House of Commons and then bring in a Conservative budget that attacks unemployed workers in the way that this has.
I want to thank him for bringing those personal experiences and knowledge here to the floor of the House of Commons. What does he think about the idea that all the people he represented, the hundreds of thousands of workers he represented for all those years, had all their money used by the former Liberal government as a legal slush fund by which it played a shell game to create its balanced budgets? I would like to ask him to reflect on how those workers feel about having paid all those years only to see the money virtually stolen from their fund. This fund was for unemployed workers, nothing else.
How does he now feel about the idea that out of that $54 billion there will only be $2 billion put aside at a time when the world and the U.S. in particular is teetering on the brink of major recession? Could the member explain on behalf of those workers what this does to them?