Madam Speaker, it has been very much argued that the level of government at the municipal level has the hardest time out of all three levels accomplishing what they need to accomplish for their citizens.
When we have an employment insurance program as broken as this one, when an economy faces, as many of our communities are now facing, drastic fundamental job losses, the inability for those employees, those workers, to now go out and collect EI has a ripple effect, not only within their homes but across their communities. There simply is no money in their economy and it creates a vicious cycle where the community gets poorer and poorer and it is so much more difficult to recover from that point.