Madam Speaker, it is a great pleasure to address my colleague opposite for, I think, the first time in the House tonight. My colleague spoke about understanding priorities and I am glad he raised that because I am not quite clear on what the Liberal Party understands as priorities.
Our government understands that creating jobs and economic growth and also helping Canadians during their times of need is core to government. That is why we have undertaken numerous measures over the last six years to see that through, measures which my colleagues opposite have opposed several times.
I just want to remind my colleague opposite of some of the positive things that we are doing to help Canadians. First, even though there is a global economic downturn, we have created over 600,000 net new jobs. which is a positive statistic and a positive thing for Canadians.
With regard to some of the other things my colleague has said, we provided 2.6 million self-employed Canadians with access to special EI benefits on a voluntary basis. We improved the work sharing program. We capped EI premiums for 2011. We introduced the wage earner protection program. Those are all tangible measures to help Canadians in times of need because we understand that, yes, there is definitely fragility in our economy right now and we need to help people when they are out of work.
However, we also need to talk about ensuring that we have a service provision. Canadians have given our government a very clear mandate to eliminate the deficit and return to balanced budgets while making our services more effective and efficient. That is what we are trying to do here. We have established a service improvement agenda with short and long-term objectives and we are taking action to ensure that those Canadians in need of EI receive these benefits in a timely manner.
Automation is an important element of our EI service modernization effort. Why is that? Its aim is to alleviate the cumbersome paper based processes and get benefits to eligible people faster no matter where they live, exactly what my colleague opposite is talking about. To get benefits to eligible people is part of this process.
This year, as with other years, we added resources in anticipation of the peak period in December and January. In fact, over the last number of weeks, we have added about 400 employees to our processing efforts and shifted 120 staff from part-time to full-time, as well as substantively increasing our use of overtime. This is to get benefits out to Canadians in need.
Contrary to the claims of my colleague opposite, we are working hard to serve Canadians' needs and ensure that our system is modern and effective well into the future. We are also taking steps to reassign staff from non-core functions within Service Canada to get them out on those front lines to assist with claims processing during peak needs.
In the long run, and this is important, we are confident that we can improve service to Canadians through our three-year modernization initiative.
In summary, we are working hard and we are working hard on behalf of Canadians to improve the services we deliver.