Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague is correct on one part of it. It is a typical Liberal plan to use the EI fund for any of its hijinks games.
The EI fund is an insurance fund. It belongs to the people who pay into it. It does not belong to the Liberals' smoke doctors in the backroom who are always trying to come up with some shiny bauble.
We looked at it, we brought it to committee, and we realized it was just a dumb idea.
It is not nearly as vicious, though, as the $57 billion that the Liberals took out of EI. They used the EI fund, they stripped it bare, and they called that an example of Paul Martin's great visionary economics. Now they want to come around with this idea that this was going to create tens of thousands of jobs. It is such a fiction, and it is an unfair fiction when in some parts of this country, seven out 10 people who pay into EI are not able to get their own insurance money back. The Liberal Party would take their insurance money, the money that they paid into EI, and use it for their schemes to promote the Liberal leader, the member for Papineau. That is unconscionable.
We will always stand up to defend the rights of people to have the money they put in. Just like their pension, just like their EI, these are things to be protected, not to be played with.