Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend my hon. colleague on his speech.
In his current function as parliamentary secretary certainly he has had a lot of conversations with stakeholders on this issue. When the government was formulating Bill C-50 I would imagine at that point the government would have addressed the issue of seasonal workers.
My question comes from an illustration in my riding that talks about a group of individuals who work in a shrimp processing plant. They are seasonal workers. They have been doing it for 35 years in some cases, for an extremely long time. The average age is above 50, so the member can well imagine how long they have been working at those jobs and how much they depend on them through their daily lives.
The problem is that because the work is seasonal in nature they do not qualify under Bill C-50 because of the rules stated, that if they claimed so many weeks in the past five years, per year, they are ineligible.
How does the parliamentary secretary square that issue? What is it that I should say from him to the individual shrimp worker on the Bonavista Peninsula in Newfoundland?