Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand and speak to Bill C-50, a bill to once again improve the Employment Insurance Act, this time to deal with improvements to payments and benefits to long-tenured workers.
Before I get into the essence of the bill itself, it would be beneficial to all to take a little trip back in history to try to determine exactly how we got to this point today.
Some of my other colleagues in this place this afternoon have indicated that for 13 years under the previous Liberal administration there were really no substantive changes to the EI program whatsoever. What we did find out though, however, was that during that time there was an incredible amount of surplus in the EI fund, a notional fund, of upwards of $50 billion which the previous government basically put into general revenues. This was widely known and quite frankly unacceptable to most Canadians.