Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed parts of that speech, but I have a big problem with the minister's commitment to understanding a labour market. It results from looking at Treasury Board figures on how many people have been fired from Statistics Canada. Over the last three years, there have been over 2,000 employees fired from Statistics Canada. In the early 2000s, there were about 8,500 employees at Statistics Canada. Now there are about 4,500.
The Conservatives have been chopping and chopping away with their ideological attacks, getting rid of the long form census, and cutting out labour force surveys. Now they are saying they want to have a great handle on how the labour force works, and again, are relying on things like Kijiji to fill the holes.
These folks at Statistics Canada are some of the best trained statisticians in the world. I want to know when he will repopulate the labour force within Statistics Canada so we can understand what is going on with our labour force in Canada.