Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-280. I want to congratulate my colleague for introducing it.
I have a few things I want to say, but I cannot let go unchallenged what the parliamentary secretary has read from his speaking notes, provided by some un-named person in the lobby, which he picked up on the way in here.
He talked about the cuts that were made in the 1990s. He is older than I am, so he is old enough to recall the circumstance of Canada back in 1993, when his former Conservative government skulked out of town with its tail between its legs, leaving a $48 billion annual deficit, a debt that it had built up. When Mr. Trudeau left, that debt was $200 billion. By the time that government was finished, it was $500 billion.
Maybe the people in the lobby are not as good as I thought they were at putting these notes out. He should know that the cuts began with Mr. Mulroney in 1990. It was in 1990 when the federal government walked away from EI and said that employers and employees could carry the whole weight. That government did not want any part of it. That was when those people were building up the deficit.
There are a lot of history books that can tell us the difference between 1995 and 2008, but I will tell the members the difference. Back then we were coming out of a Conservative recession into a Liberal recovery. We are now coming out of a Liberal recovery and into a Conservative recession. Back then there was not one person in the country talking about stimulus. People were talking about debt. We were being called a third world economy because we were so far in debt.
Changes were made. Some of us liked them and some of us did not. The fact is we had a lot of problems in the country that we had to be dealt with and that is what we did back in 1995-96.
Members of his party, his ancestors, including the current Prime Minister, did not think we went far enough. They wanted further cuts. The predecessor to the current Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development said the cuts were not deep enough.
Let me come back to today. Instead of people talking about paying down the debt, as they did in the 1990s, they are now talking about stimulus. My colleague from Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing mentioned stimulus and Ian Lee from the Sprott School of Business. There are three major ways of stimulating the economy.
I see my colleague from Niagara West—Glanbrook, the very learned chair of the HRSD committee, is nodding in agreement with what I am saying. He is amazed at what the parliamentary secretary said. He cannot believe it.
If we look at the three major ways to stimulate an economy, one is to provide tax breaks. However, tax breaks stimulate the people who do not need the stimulus. According to the Caledon Institute, tax breaks in the last budget will go to people making $150,000, including my colleagues. We will get $483 in tax breaks. A single income person with two kids receives nothing. Is that stimulus? Most MPs do not even know what they pay in taxes except for the very month when they have to file. They are not going to spend the money.
The people who need the money are the people who have nothing else on which to live. They get the money and they spend it, and it is a 1.6 turnover in the economy. That is how an economy is stimulated. It is helpful to the people who need the money as well. It is way better than tax breaks and a much better return than infrastructure.
The parliamentary secretary talked about our leader adopting a new position. From January 29 on, our leader was not even officially the leader, but he was already talking about EI. He said, and I am quoting from the paper now, “If the government fails on these accountability tests, including employment insurance, a confidence vote could trigger an election”. He said that on January 29, some time ago. Now he has called upon the Prime Minister to implement a national standard for employment insurance with a temporary 360 hour threshold for eligibility.
A letter appeared this week in La Presse in Montreal, written by Pierre Céré, who is a champion of workers in Quebec. I will just quote a bit. He said, “The EI system must become a program that provides economic security and thus the dignity of workers who lose their jobs and who are temporarily unemployed. The only partisanship, as we know it, is in that fight. That is why we do not hesitate to acknowledge the position of Mr. Ignatieff and encourage him in this direction”. However. it is not only—