Minister, the Trudeau government has given Saskatchewan the short end of the stick in its budget. The Liberal government excluded two thirds of Saskatchewan's oil patch from changes to Employment Insurance, then told families in these suffering areas that they should consider themselves lucky they weren't harder hit. Saskatchewan farmers can't find support in the Trudeau government's budget, either. Your budget speech barely mentioned agriculture in passing. Even this was nothing but flowery language, stating:

Wherever the sun shines and the wind blows, farmers and landowners can become energy producers.

The Trudeau government gave Saskatchewan less than 1 per cent of the infrastructure money, even though we are 3 per cent of Canada's population. Employment Insurance, agriculture, infrastructure. When will this Trudeau government finally give Saskatchewan its fair share?

Hon. William Morneau, P.C., M.P., Minister of Finance: Well, thank you, senator, for the question. We took a look at the challenges facing Canadians that are in the most difficult situation, most hard hit because of the changes in the resource prices. In doing that, we obviously focused on sharp and sustained changes in employment.

We saw that in a number of places, but, obviously, we looked at Alberta. We did look at Saskatchewan. We did look at Newfoundland and Labrador. We looked at parts of northern Ontario, and we came to the conclusion that we would enhance our Employment Insurance plan for those places that had had a sharp, 2 per cent increase in unemployment on a sustained basis. That was a decision we took in order to try to soften the blow.

There is, of course, another series of measures that we believe will be important for the economy across the country. As I said, we've made significant investments in infrastructure. We intend to move forward with those infrastructure funds now. You've seen the very first phase of infrastructure spending in our budget, which is the first $11.9 billion. But I would encourage you to look at what we've said we will do in the second phase of our spending.

We will be coming out later this year with what we're going to do with the second phase of our infrastructure spending, which will be significant. We've committed to $120 billion over 10 years. We've only laid down the track for that $11.9 billion, so we have much more work to do in that regard. With respect to our innovation agenda, we'll be coming forward to talk about how we can develop networks and clusters of successful firms, research institutes and universities, and among the places we'll be looking will be the agriculture sector. So we will be thinking about how Canada can be even more successful in agriculture than it's been in the past. One of the things that my Advisory Council on Economic Growth will be looking at is the agriculture sector, how we can be more successful by making investments in that sector. You'll be hearing more about that this year as well.

So we will remain committed to helping those areas that are hard hit, and we'll be moving forward with specific measures now, as well as further measures that you'll hear about in the fall.