Mr. Speaker, I am afraid my influence with the NDP is rather modest at this point.
The hon. member does come from Oshawa which is where I had the great honour to practise law for 22 years. I know the community quite well and I know exactly the concerns that are being faced by the folks in Oshawa, particularly those who are associated with the car manufacturing business. I share with him that concern.
The trouble is that because the government does not really pay much attention to serious policy discussion, bad choices get made. He mentioned EI. Probably, as I said before, the least the government could do was to add on five weeks at the tail end of the period. However, that is precisely it. That is all it did. We are facing 128,000 job losses and what do we get? We get five weeks at the tail end.
The government could have and probably should have eliminated the waiting period. What it could have done and should have done was eliminated the number of hours that Oshawa workers need to qualify for EI. It could have made it very similar to all of the other communities around the country that I have mentioned.
I regret that this is a budget implementation bill. The budget itself, the government takes some of the good stuff and wrecks it with some dumb ideas.