Mr. Speaker, my colleague is spot-on when he points out that there have been so many drastic cuts to so many services in the federal civil services, and employment insurance has not been exempt from that.
I will remind people it is “Service” and not “Services” Canada. I think the Conservatives might have dropped the “s” during its mandate. However, there clearly is a much longer wait period for people to try to get their files treated. Some people are on the phone for hours at a time. This is not an exaggeration. It is three hours sometimes. My understanding is that they are not even counting the statistics if people hang up before Service Canada hangs up on them. Therefore, when he says that there has been a degradation in the amount of time that people wait to have their calls treated by Service Canada, in fact it under-reports what the actual situation is because people cannot spend the day on the phone.
I will remind my colleague and members of the Conservative Party that when people wait that long on the phone before they can get some service from Service Canada, perhaps their time would be better spent looking for a job. However, no, they have to sit at home waiting for an answer from Service Canada. The government has cut much too much and it is very inefficient.