Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for her kind comment.
Let us talk about the employment insurance fund: $57 billion was taken from the fund in the past merely to pad the government coffers. The Conservatives and the Liberals were trying to balance their own budgets using money that was paid into the fund by workers and employers. The money in this fund does not belong to the government. Because they did this, we now have less money to pay people who need employment insurance benefits. No one likes receiving employment insurance, but there are some people who have no other choice.
What the Conservatives are proposing now is penalizing people who have lower salaries and those who cannot work full-time. In my opinion, the old method and the current method should be combined to ensure that people who are able to receive a higher salary benefit from the program, but also to ensure that people who do not benefit from the program can choose to combine the two programs in order to take advantage of the calculation that would be most beneficial to them.