Mr. Speaker, we can all look at the so-called reforms to EI and judge whether we liked them or not. The first big hit on the government began with the Mulroney government in 1990.
I would repeat again that I was not a member of the government in the 1990s. If I had been a member of the government, I do not have any reason to believe that I would have voted against the budgets because those budgets in fact brought stability to this country. It turned us from what the economists referred to as an economic basket case. In areas like social infrastructure, health, education, EI and other measures, we have to be able to afford those. When we could, we brought in things like the child tax benefit which is one of the most important things in keeping the rate of child poverty down.
I am very proud of what the Liberal government did. That does not mean I agreed with everything it did, but I applaud the people who put their back into it and made this country more secure, put it on a more economically solid footing, and gave us a chance to weather this Conservative recession.