Madam Speaker, it seems to me that this is where we came in as a Liberal government in 1993. It seems to me that this is history repeating itself. Because of the Conservative-led deep recession, a Conservative-led deficit, a Conservative-led debt, and unemployment rates for young people, which today is at 19.2% and was at 22% at that time, that in fact it was as a result of that, which was called the jobless recovery after that recession, that we changed the employment insurance system of the day to meet the needs of Canadians.
We continued to see that employment insurance worked during the good times, which came about under good Liberal management. It made this country recover and become one of the number one countries in the world in terms of economic development, research and development and innovation.
During that time, we shifted the system to meet those times. What we are asking for now, and we were prepared to sit down with the government and work on this, is to equalize this. Regionally today in a recession, which we saw in the last recession when we changed things then, people were losing jobs, different sectors were disadvantaged and different parts of this country were disadvantaged. We wanted to equalize that. We wanted to create an equality of opportunity for Canadians.
We cannot look back at what was done ten years ago. We are in a different place now. The government needs, as we did then, to act and to act swiftly to meet the needs of Canadians of the day. That is what we are asking the government to do, to act now and to act swiftly, because people cannot afford to wait a year and six months when they are one paycheque away from bankruptcy.