Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary presented government subsidy through the Canada summer jobs program as the solution to this youth unemployment crisis, but let us talk about some numbers.
Canada has over two million post-secondary students. The jobs numbers from Statistics Canada show that about one in five returning students was unemployed this summer, so we are talking about probably more than 400,000 students. The government's response is to say that it proposes to subsidize 6,000 new positions. Many of those positions are actually for eight weeks, so we are talking about a problem, for returning students alone, of over 400,000 positions, and its response is a public subsidy for 6,000 positions.
I think these numbers underline that we cannot subsidize our way out of a bad economy. The government needs to fix the underlying problems.