Mr. Speaker, last May 26, I asked a question in the House concerning employment insurance and the regional disparities and discrimination based on eligibility rules that picked out winners and losers.
The Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development went on about some of the changes that had been made to EI benefits but refused to address the issue of regional disparity and in fact regional fairness. I would again like to hear what the government has to say.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge. The Prime Minister and my leader, the Leader of the Opposition, put together a bipartisan working group composed of three Conservatives and three Liberals, and I was one of them, to work over the summer. The only party that put forward any kind of proposal at that particular working group was the Liberal Party.
In their usual manner, the Conservatives came out with figures that inflated the actual cost of the Liberal proposal. Members do not need to take my word for it, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer did an independent assessment of the government's estimate of the Liberal proposal and said that the government had overestimated and that the Liberal proposal for one eligibility rate standard of 360 hours would cost approximately $1.2 billion and not the $4 billion that the government claimed and continues to repeat, notwithstanding that the independent assessment proved it wrong.
The government has now come out with Bill C-50, which would extend benefits anywhere from 5 to 20 weeks but, again, has not addressed the issue of regional fairness.
The government has claimed that Bill C-50 would help approximately 190,000 Canadians. However, the veracity of that particular number has been questioned in the media, by third parties and in committee itself. The bill is now before committee at second reading.
Experts are saying that the figure is not 190,000. In fact, they believe the number of beneficiaries would be as low as 60,000. The government has refused to provide clarity on how it comes up with its figure of 190,000 Canadians who will be assisted by the changes it is proposing in Bill C-50.
How can the government justify throwing numbers out for which there is no basis? It refuses to explain its methodology. It refuses to provide the actual figures. It is doing the same thing with the issue of Bill C-50 and backing up the exact number of Canadians who will actually be assisted by it that it has been doing with the infrastructure and stimulus plan.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has said that the government is providing information in such an obscure manner that it is impossible to independently verify the government's claims.