Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Minister, I want to return to the issue of employment insurance, since it is such a big part of what your department does and also because it seems to come up frequently in Parliament, the issue of using employment insurance as a way to deliver a whole range of new benefits, whether it be enhanced worker training or enhanced worker mobility or leave for families who have a member of the family who is ill, and the like.
I want to return to this for those two reasons. It seems to me we are constantly being presented with proposals to enhance employment insurance, to use employment insurance as a panacea for all our problems, whether they be poverty or labour mobility or otherwise. The problem with employment insurance, as we all know, is that it's not universal, in the sense that not everybody is eligible to pay into it. If you're a contract employee, if you're self-employed, you're not eligible to use the program. If you're a cab driver in Toronto, if you've opened a falafel shop in Montreal, if you're a bricklayer on contract in Calgary or Vancouver, you are simply not eligible to pay into the program. The biggest group that's not eligible to pay into it, ironically, is the unemployed. New Canadians and those who are chronically unemployed are not eligible for the program because they simply don't have any way to pay into the fund and receive its benefits.
I'm wondering if you could tell this committee a little bit more about the rules around which people are eligible for the program, and why, in your view, some of these private member's bills that come in front of us from time to time are not the best way to proceed?