Statement made on 29 September 2009 by Senator Jerahmiel Grafstein (retired)
Hon. Jerahmiel S. Grafstein:
Honourable senators, I have questions for the Leader of the Government in the Senate on unemployment statistics. The labour statistics recently released indicate that from August 2008 to August 2009, there was a 47 percent increase in the number of unemployed people in Canada; from 774,000 to 1,136,000. In July 2009, 788,000 people were receiving Employment Insurance, which is an increase from July of the previous year.
I will not continue the debate with the honourable senator in respect of my home province of Ontario and the city of Toronto. I stand by the figures that I provided last week, and I hope that the leader will respond in writing to those figures more specifically. It is clear from these statistics that although the number of EI beneficiaries in Windsor, Hamilton, Leamington, Chatham-Kent, St. Catharines, Niagara and Oshawa grew in July at a slower pace than during the previous year, they still grew.
We are in a situation of apparent success with respect to selling the government's economic plan, which I have read. However, I fail to understand how the plan affects the ground level in my province, city by city, area by area, and sector by sector. Certainly, the situation is worse in the United States. We look at the United States as a demand pull for some of our jobs, but it will not happen in the next year or two. As brilliantly crafted as the action plan is, and I congratulate the government for that, it is not doing the job.
I have a suggestion for the Leader of the Government in the Senate: Given the disagreement on both sides of the house over the numbers, why do we not convene a Committee of the Whole and invite officials from Statistics Canada to appear so that there might be an open debate of the issue to settle the facts in the interests of all Canadians? Perhaps a plan can be developed that will put people back to work.
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