Madam Speaker, I am proud to participate in this debate on the Liberal motion, a motion of non-confidence in this Conservative government.
When listening to my leader's speech on the non-confidence motion, he said something that really resonated with me and I know that it will really resonate with thousands of Canadians and Quebeckers. He said that in the eyes of the Conservatives, adversaries are enemies and that this Conservative government and all Conservative members currently sitting in this House have demonstrated, over the past four years, that they lack the moral courage to tell Canadians and Quebeckers the truth.
Let me give an example. I was a member of the employment insurance group that tried to work over the summer. This group consisted of two Conservative members—the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, my colleague from Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, the Liberal critic for human resources and skills development, and myself, the Deputy House Leader. Three weeks passed before we had our technical briefing. We asked for it right away, but the Conservatives told us that the parliamentary secretary was on holidays and that the planned briefing meeting for the two Liberals had to be postponed. There was a third Liberal, our chief political advisor. Thus, we agreed to postpone this meeting to accommodate the Prime Minister's parliamentary secretary.
We finally had our first briefing meeting. We also submitted the Liberal proposal for making employment insurance more equitable, and for ensuring that hundreds of thousands of Canadians who lose their jobs in these tough economic times have access to employment insurance. I am talking about people who have worked and paid their employment insurance premiums. We explained that, according to our calculations, a single national threshold of 360 hours would cost $1.5 billion.
For months, the Conservatives kept saying, here in this House and to the public, that the Liberal proposal of 360 hours was 45 days of work for one year of employment insurance benefits. They kept saying the same thing over and over again knowing that it was not true, but they kept repeating it. We asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to analyze the government's estimate. The government said that the 360-hour national eligibility threshold for employment insurance benefits would cost Canadians $4 billion. The Parliamentary Budget Officer did an independent analysis both of the Liberal proposal and of the costing and methodology that the Conservatives used. I will quote exactly what the Parliamentary Budget Officer said in his report tabled on September 9, 2009.
PBO calculations show that the Government’s own estimate of the static cost of the proposed 360-hour national standard is $1.148 billion (including administrative costs).
I will repeat that. The Parliamentary Budget Officer's calculations show that the government's own estimate of the static cost of the proposed 360-hour national standard is $1.148 billion, including administrative costs. In the opinion of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the $1.148 billion estimate is a reasonable estimate of the cost of the proposed 360-hour national standard of EI.
Last, the government's total cost estimate in excess of $4 billion presented on August 6 is not consistent with the proposed 360-hour national standard. Why? Because the government included all kinds of people who were not included in the Liberal proposal.
What does the government do? Does the government show moral courage and say, “We got it wrong. We inflated the numbers. We did it in good faith but our numbers were inflated almost four times the actual cost of the Liberal 360-hour proposal”? No, it has continued, in this House, to spout the same mistruth, bogus numbers. It is in black and white.
This is an example of a government and its members who are prepared to say anything in order to advance their own partisan interests.
With respect to the NDP, my goodness, I am someone who grew up admiring the NDP. Some of my heroes are the original founders of the CCF and then of the NDP. We hear the NDP members in their sanctimonious way claim that the reason they are going to prop up this incompetent, self-serving Conservative government is that the EI measures contained in Bill C-50 are so crucial and so important, and will help so many unemployed, that they are ready to put aside the 79 times they said they had no confidence in the government and prop up the government. Is that not interesting?
The government brought down a budget just a few months ago. In that budget, there was over $5 billion in employment insurance measures. The NDP voted against it. The NDP voted for an election and if the NDP had gotten what it wanted, namely an election last spring, there would be hundreds of thousands of unemployed Canadians who would not be benefiting from that $5 billion.
They are settling for measures that will not help seasonal workers, that will not help unemployed workers who work in industries where there are periodic layoffs, that will not help women who have had children and are re-entering the workforce. That does not matter to the NDP.
I would like to hear what the NDP members are going to say to those hundreds of thousands of workers who do not benefit from the measures in Bill C-50. How are they going to explain that they are now prepared to prop up the Conservative government knowing that the government does not tell the truth, knowing that the government fudges the numbers, knowing that the government puts out bogus numbers to hoodwink Canadians? How are they going to explain that?
How do the Conservatives explain that they are prepared, day after day, to repeat the same untruths?