Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments by the member opposite in terms of the compassion that members of Parliament feel towards those who have lost their jobs and whose families are impacted. I certainly share that view.
It was an interesting, contextual and philosophical set of comments. The word that really struck me, though, was when the member used the word “timely”. If anything, this proposed bill is completely untimely. We have a government that in its update last November claimed that Canada would be in surplus for this year and future years. That was pretty untimely. It was already a country in deficit. The untimely budget in January proposed a $32 billion deficit, which soon after has skyrocketed to $55 billion.
The thing that is completely mystifying in terms of the government's performance is that it did absolutely nothing to table this measure during the summer, when there was a Liberal-Conservative EI working group to make exactly the improvements to EI that the member claims this bill is about. Instead, the—