Mr. Speaker, under any objective measure, we had lower unemployment than the Americans did during the Harper era and we have a third higher unemployment right now. This is if we line up the measurements of unemployment, apples to apples, between the two countries.
There are 800,000 Canadians who have lost their jobs and not regained them and our unemployment is significantly higher than that of the Americans, which means either we have not recovered as many jobs or we went in with a much higher jobless rate to begin with. Either way, the parliamentary secretary should stop making excuses and tell these Canadians when they will get their paycheques back.