Madam Speaker, I always appreciate a pointed and difficult question in the House.
The fact of the matter is that Canadians would have been far better served in the pandemic if not for the chronic problems with employment insurance. They were not really news to many of the people who had to avail themselves of employment insurance, or who tried and could not, and the organizations that work with folks who have needed employment insurance over the years. We should have done the work they were already calling on us to do.
There is another way in which Canadians would have been very well served if we had done the homework on employment insurance early on. As I mentioned earlier in my remarks, one of the big problems we have right now is a lack of a way to hook up workers who are out of work and trying to find a way back into the labour market with the training they need that pertains directly to a job that is available in the market. That is something we used to do in the unemployment insurance system we had many years ago in Canada. We used to work with workers to find a job and train them up to it. We need something like that in our EI system again.