Mr. Speaker, I am not sure I heard a question in the member's comments.
There is actually a significant change in the argument we have heard from the Conservatives. If members remember, initially the finance minister said that this was going to create 25,000 jobs, or person years. They changed the metrics a little bit.
The initiative to take $550 million out of the employment insurance fund, money that does not belong to the government, was to create jobs. That was the headline. That was the news. That is what the minister was saying. However, when we asked for any analysis, when we asked them to defend this argument, they had nothing. What they had were a couple of quotes from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Dan Kelly, who is the head of that organization, said:
On a firm-by-firm basis, I think that's quite right. You are not going to pay for a full job through an EI hiring credit.
It is not a huge amount of money. This is not a scheme that will create the jobs the government claims. In a time of economic weakness, in a time of global uncertainty, to take $550 million out of the EI fund and not create any jobs out of it seems like a failed opportunity. To not allow people who paid into the fund, because it is not just the employers, it is the employees, to actually access employment insurance, especially if they have lost their jobs, as 400,000 of them just in the manufacturing sector have, seems cruel. It seems bad for the economy.
If the Conservatives are now saying that maybe it will maintain a few jobs, that is a completely different argument than the one the finance minister used. They will have to get their arguments straight. The Conservatives certainly do not have any evidence to back up that this is what they claimed initially.
This will not do what it says, and that is a failure of any intelligence from the government.