Mr. Speaker, the hon. member should realize that the EI premiums are now set, and will be set starting in 2011, by an independent arm's-length EI financing board.
Why are we doing that? For starters, we froze the EI premiums for two years during this recession so that we could protect jobs, so that we could keep more money in people's pockets. Also, we wanted to prevent what happened under the Liberals' watch, where the Liberals created a $50 billion surplus in the EI account and spent it on their political pet projects.