Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the comments by the member for St. Catharines on Bill C-9. I know the member and his riding of St. Catharines, Ontario well. When he reflects on what he has heard in the committee meetings, it strikes me that those reflections are rather selective.
I know the people in St. Catharines are profoundly worried about their pensions. At the committee meetings, there was a huge call for pension reform with respect to protecting pensions in cases of commercial bankruptcy and increasing the CPP. People are profoundly worried about seniors falling into poverty and the need to enhance the GIS. Yet there is nothing in the budget about those things.
What is in the budget is the finalization of the theft of $57 billion from the EI fund, something that is also of huge concern in the entire Niagara Peninsula and across the country. Representations were made to the committee about that as well as the privatization of Canada Post, the sell-off of AECL and protecting the environment.
If the member feels as strongly as he indicated today about some aspects of the budget, last night why did he not support severing some of the other key items like EI reform, like the sell-off of AECL and the privatization of Canada Post so we could deal with those as stand-alone matters and he could truly represent the interests of his constituents?