Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her question on a range of issues that she brought forward with respect to the comments I made on Bill C-9.
On the first point about housing, I would remind her in our budgets from when I was elected in 2004-05, we invested millions of dollars in housing and this was after we put our fiscal house in order. However, more important, with respect to the infrastructure, under Mr. Martin we came up with a gas tax transfer, a new deal for municipalities that really provided cities with sustainable funding.
With respect to EI, the member raises a good point because this is a payroll tax. There have been numerous independent studies. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business indicated that this would cause a loss of 200,000 jobs, which is why it is termed as a job-killing payroll tax. The amount is $13 billion. As indicated in my remarks, for a family of two that amounts to an additional cost of $1,264 on an annualized basis, and for a company that employs about 10 people, that amounts to approximately $8,884 on an annualized basis. That is a substantial amount of money in terms of a tax burden on small businesses and on middle-class families. Again, it does not help our productivity or competitiveness and, more important, it does not help us create jobs.