Madam Speaker, before I go into the details about EI, I will say that the impact is quite great. Just in the last two months of 2008 over 100,000 people lost their jobs and we have been hearing about job loss after job loss ever since.
On the free trade agreement, if we had fair trade, that would be great. We would be able to compete, and we can compete, as long as the government is willing to invest in the industries that we already have.
With the lumber industry, for example, when we did our prebudget consultations we heard that what that industry wanted was access to credit. Reasonable access to credit would have kept some of those mills going and kept the jobs going.
It is the same thing with our shipbuilding industry. If the government wanted to be serious about investing in shipbuilding, we would certainly be able to protect the jobs that we currently have and eventually create more jobs.
On the EI part, access to EI certainly has grave impacts across the north. Again, because of the inefficiencies across Canada, the required hours are not the same for everyone. I put forward a private member's bill to reduce that to 360 hours for everybody. I am hoping the House will support that bill when we discuss it.
As I said, when we consider that for every $60 given as a corporate tax credit only $1 goes to EI, that is an atrocity. Economists have said that an EI recipient spends that money in his or her community and there is economic stimulus right away. Within two weeks of a recipient receiving his or her EI cheque, he or she will have spent it on necessities. What happens with big corporate tax cuts? The corporations put that money in their pockets and go away, and sometimes that money is invested overseas.