Mr. Speaker, while the government keeps insisting that the economy is reasonably strong, the fact is 800,000 workers are on EI and a lot of them are about to run out of benefits. There are very few jobs for them.
The government says the economy is going to grow by 2.6% in 2010. It has to do at least that since the working age population is growing by 1% per year. The budget's own unemployment projections show jobless rates increasing from where they are now at 8.2% to 8.5% and falling slowly after that.
How is the government's rosy picture of developments going to solve this problem when clearly it is not being solved by its initiatives so far?