Madam Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this adjournment debate and raise a question I asked on April 1, 2009, several months ago.
My question followed the disclosure of information about positions at Service Canada being posted in March 2008 but not filled yet in March 2009. Service Canada is now in charge of employment insurance, among other things.
Let us remember that, even if the Conservative government was denying the existence of the economic crisis at that time, people in our ridings were suffering. They did not have access to the employment insurance benefits they were entitled to because of unacceptable delays.
The Conservatives denied the existence of the crisis, and fathers and mothers had to pay the price. Let us be realistic. They are not the only ones paying the price. Their whole family is paying the price, including their children, along with their brothers and sisters. One year went by without positions being filled as they should have been.
Now it is September 16, 2009, and several months have passed since I asked that question on April 1, but I am still wondering what the Conservative government has done about it. It boasted that it was going to inject funds to hire people and speed up request processing so that unemployed workers could collect their first employment insurance cheque. Back then, and even now, workers had to wait more than 55 days to receive their first benefit cheque, which is totally unacceptable.
Now it is September 16 and we are still wondering where these people who were supposed to be hired are. Just to clarify, I am talking about employees in regional Service Canada centres. I am not talking about Service Canada employees in offices, call centres or other places where employees never meet clients face to face.
The fact is that we have to provide a service to our workers, a service to Canadian citizens. Today, I am still looking for these new workers in local centres that are supposed to be open to our citizens every day. We have been waiting for over a year, and we have often raised the issue of this crisis, but we are still waiting for these new employees while countless working families have had to wait two months or more to receive their first employment insurance cheque.
Last year, the Conservative government said that there was no crisis. It said that it was going to hire people, but in the end, it figured that the crisis would pass, that there would be no need for extra employees and that people would continue to receive their employment insurance benefits.
Why have we not yet seen concrete results and more workers in Service Canada centres?
I cannot wait to hear the parliamentary secretary's reply. He better not make up stories about additional positions being created in local offices because that is not true. When someone retires, the position is not filled. And if by chance it is filled, it goes to a central office. That is not what Canadians and the citizens in our ridings need. They need concrete results.
I will ask my question once again. Where are the new jobs that the Conservatives have been promising since 2008?