Mr. Speaker, I want to build on the finance minister's comments.
We heard about the heart-wrenching situation taking place in Alberta. The reality is that the budget bill before us, the omnibus budget bill, does make changes to EI. While some of those changes are welcome, they certainly do not go far enough. In fact, workers in Edmonton, southern Saskatchewan, Winnipeg, and other parts of the country who desperately need changes to be made to EI so that they can access EI are not able to. We are talking about workers who have been deeply affected by the downturn in the extractive sector.
While we hear comforting rhetoric from the minister, the NDP proposed splitting the bill so that we could get at fixing EI for Canadians who need it most, but the government disagreed.
We have to be clear that this omnibus budget bill, and that is what it is, does not go nearly far enough when it comes to making the changes to EI that are necessary for Canadians.
Furthermore, as my colleagues have reiterated, when Canadians voted on October 19, they were told by the Liberals that they were voting for real change. The cutting off of debate today is the opposite of that. It is certainly in line with the anti-democratic approach that we saw from the previous Conservative government. Not only are the measures inadequate in this budget, but certainly, the failure to give us the opportunity to scrutinize the budget properly certainly flies in the face of that commitment to Canadians of real change.