Madam Speaker, the low levels of unemployment across the OECD in the pre-pandemic period are entirely the result of a large share of the workforce retiring, and therefore the unemployment rate dropped everywhere. Across the OECD almost every country in the world had record low unemployment up until the COVID crisis. Before the COVID crisis, Canada's unemployment was still higher than the U.S., the U.K., Japan and Germany. It was higher than those countries and only lower than socialist France and Italy, and it has worsened, moving behind Italy since that time, so now we only have Italy with higher unemployment than Canada in the G7.
So, the member finally says that we have recovered a larger share of our lost jobs than the Americans, but that is because we had a higher unemployment rate than the Americans going into the crisis. If a nation has a weak job market and a weak economy going into a crisis, obviously it is going to be weaker throughout that crisis, and we are seeing that happen now.