Mr. Speaker, if I accept the member's false premise for a moment, I could turn the question on him and ask, why this fantastic amount of job-killing payroll tax hikes by the Conservatives when, as he just said, they froze the EI premiums, but all the experts are saying that circumstances call for a reduction?
It is the member's government that has imposed artificially high payroll taxes in the form of EI premiums that are too high. The member is the one who should be apologizing for these job-destroying payroll taxes.
I will have to take him through the subject once again. What I said and what is true is that when an individual Canadian pays more premiums on the Canada pension plan, that is not a tax, because every penny of that money is invested on behalf of that person, and every penny plus a substantial return goes back to that individual as a pension in his or her retirement years. That is not, I repeat, a tax. I will repeat what I said earlier, which the member seems to ignore, that it is his party that has imposed an unnecessarily high level of employment insurance premiums.