Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to what the member had to say. The government had said 190,000 unemployed workers would benefit from the bill, at a cost of around $935 million, or almost $1 billion. The member is disputing this based on a half-hour presentation by the government.
I recommend we get the bill to the committee. We should listen to the expert witnesses and, hopefully, she can get answers to her questions and then make a judgment at that time as to whether the bill does what she wants it to or not.
We know this is not all we want to help improve our EI system, but we recognize we have a bill in front of us and we do not want to turn our backs on helping 190,000 workers, at $1 billion. We are prepared to keep working on some of our other legislation before the House, legislation dealing with other aspects of EI, which we think are important as well, but we should not throw out a measure like this just because we cannot have everything at one time.
This is a complicated series that we have to work with and we have to get improvements one at a time.