Madam Speaker, one of the great things about our economic action plan was how we responded quickly to the people who through no fault of their own ended up without jobs.
This was a massive economic global recession, the worst since World War II. What we had in our country was an EI program that responded. There were more dollars through our budget commitment in the economic action. People were able to get to work.
It also included work-sharing. They were able to get the dollars they needed to support businesses to do some short-term layoffs but allow businesses to keep growing. It was estimated that this resulted in preserving up to some 250,000 jobs across the country, just by work-sharing. It is a great program and we are sure going to keep it strong.