Well, I would challenge you on that. I think there are major challenges, for example, with the employment insurance system and the fact that only about 40% of Canadians who pay into it get access to benefits when they need them.
Certainly in my area in Toronto, not much more than a quarter of the people who are unemployed get benefits. So it's not that there aren't problems with employment insurance. Certainly we need a good review of employment insurance to take a look at some of the regional challenges, to take a look at the hours system and how that can undermine people's access to EI, and to take a look at how effectively retraining programs are doing. We are in a rapidly changing society with a lot of challenges in our labour market. Employment insurance is an adjustment program to help Canadians adapt to a changing economy. It is an adjustment program, so it's not designed to support people forever and a day, but it's designed to be there when people need it.
We'll have a further discussion about EI when other changes come up. But first I want to get on the record that I don't know why we're making this change to this particular part of EI, which is about the social security tribunal. I haven't heard anyone asking for it. I haven't heard anybody who is involved in EI or OAS appeals ask for it. I don't know where this has come from.
I know there are many changes that should be made to EI, but I just don't see this as being one of them. I also want to echo what my colleague has said, that this should not be before the finance committee; it should properly be before the parliamentarians who sit on the human resources skills development committee for examination.
My colleague mentioned the number of appeals that get referred to the boards. I also want to make the point that almost 54,000 appeals were made in the 2010-11 year, but about half of them were resolved before a hearing because officials recognized there was an error, there was an oversight, or there was incomplete information.
One of the major challenges we're hearing about today from unemployed workers is the great difficulty in getting to speak to a real person. It used to be that you went into an office, you spoke to someone in the UI office, and you made your case. You talked to a person who knew your community and might have known you, and you could explain the situation. Now people are lucky if they can ever get through on a phone line. We've heard awful examples of people waiting for hours to get through on the phone line.
My point in raising this with respect to the social security tribunal is that rather than having these thousand part-time people, who represent labour and management across the country in the regions, who are there in the community, who people can go and speak to face to face—and they are encouraged to go and meet with them face to face—we're going to have these 39 people across the country. I'm very concerned about access and about people's ability to actually get face to face, even if it's only through Skype, with these folks, and about how long the wait time is going to be, because a lot of people who get laid off are living paycheque to paycheque. If that paycheque stops coming in...and we've seen so many workplaces across this country that have closed unexpectedly. People show up for work and the door is closed: no paycheque. Often you're owed back-pay. Often you're owed vacation. You're owed severance.
Then, when you go to apply for EI, if there's a problem, you have to wait. People can't pay their bills. So a speedy resolution...especially when we're finding that so many appeals are resolved quite quickly when people do get access to a real person to speak with who can resolve their complaint.
I want to say that I'm opposed to making this change, which, without adequate study, has the potential to further limit people's access to get their due justice when it comes to making a claim for EI and EI benefits. In a country that's changing as rapidly as Canada is, and with the global economic changes taking place, I think we owe it to Canadians to have a strong and effective labour market adjustment program that can help people when they get into difficulty through no fault of their own when they lose their jobs.
At a time when our economy is still so sluggish, and so many people are still out of work—our unemployment rate is still higher than it was before the start of the last downturn—it's the wrong time to make it potentially more difficult to get EI. If we're doing anything, we should be making strides to see how we can make people's lives easier as we go through this downturn.
I'll conclude my remarks there, Chair.