Madam Speaker, I must thank my colleague from the Bloc for his question on employment insurance. He is right.
The government has done the opposite of what is required when it comes to an economic recession with staggering numbers of unemployed. One just needs to look at what we were up to in the month of January. We all know about the 129,000 additional Canadians out of work, leading to, in the last few months, a quarter of a million Canadians unemployed and a good percentage of them women who often are not eligible for employment insurance by the very nature of the system. Simply tacking on a few more weeks for which one can claim benefits does not address the fact that about 50% of Canadians who are unemployed are not able to get access to employment insurance. In fact, women continue to be disproportionately hit in this circumstance.
When we have worked on this issue over the years in this House, I can remember talking about this and from the years 1996 on we learned that the gap between men and women receiving benefits had almost doubled. Women over 45, who were almost at par with men in 1996, are now 13% behind. In Manitoba, that gap had grown from 9% to 20%, while in Quebec it exploded from 3% to 14%.
The nature of the work has changed and the way in which people need to secure employment has changed but the government refuses to address that fundamental issue. The budget implementation bill contains nothing that addresses that serious situation. As Lucie Lamarche has said so many times, we are talking about a true case of misappropriation and that is something the government needs to change.