Mr. Speaker, let us look at this. Certainly we support initiatives that actually enhance employment insurance. The only thing is that the initiatives have to be very worthwhile. My understanding is that the five weeks the government has put in has been done as a stipulation. It hopes that not very many people will access those five weeks because they are at the end.
As I mentioned before, most people will actually use up maybe about 20 weeks of employment insurance before they find a job. It would have been much better if the government would have taken some of that five weeks and put it at the beginning and put an extra three weeks at the end, but it refused to do that.
With respect to the fact that we voted against the budget, the Conservatives are going to say that we voted against all the measures. It was not all the measures that we voted against; it was all the underlying stipulations they put in that they were trying to get us to vote for, such as removing pay equity for women or the fact that they have actually attacked workers by not allowing them their raises.
I want to thank the member for the question, but that is exactly why we did not vote for their budget.