Evidence of meeting #7 for Status of Women in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was unemployed.
A recording is available from Parliament.
11:10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Good morning, everyone.
We seem to be doomed to start our meetings late because somebody is leaving as we're coming in. Anyway, here we are.
I want to welcome our witnesses today: from the Canadian Labour Congress, Barbara Byers, executive vice-president; Ken Battle, from the Caledon Institute; and Danie Harvey and Micheline Dépatie, from the Conseil national des chômeurs et chômeuses. France Turcotte is not here, right?
11:10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Welcome.
Everyone will have ten minutes. Then we will have a question-and-answer forum where people may direct their questions to each individual, or they may just ask everyone to answer. There are seven minutes for questions in the first round and five minutes for questions in the second round.
I want to remind everyone that seven minutes includes the answer, so please make sure that once you get your answer you move into your next question; otherwise we won't get through everything we have to do.
We will begin with the Canadian Labour Congress and Ms. Byers.
11:10 a.m.
Barbara Byers Executive Vice-President, Canadian Labour Congress
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I want to thank you on behalf of the more than three million members of the Canadian Labour Congress, workers who work in every industry from coast to coast to coast.
I want to say as well that this is a very important issue. Employment insurance is critically important, and especially critically important to women.
It's especially important in tough times such as we face today. Laid-off workers obviously need adequate benefits to support themselves and their families while they search for a new job. Unemployment benefits are spent on necessities, they are an effective form of economic stimulus, and they help maintain hard-hit communities. People who are on employment insurance spend their dollars in their main streets. They don't sock them away in a savings account, they don't take trips somewhere, they don't have huge investments. Their investment is back into their communities.
Compared with those when we have hit previous recessions, our EI program leaves far too many workers out in the cold, and that's especially true for women, for young workers, for low-wage, insecure workers.
In November 2008, just four in ten unemployed workers qualified for benefits. The maximum weekly benefit of $447 today is more than 25% lower than in 1996, and the average benefit is now just $335 a week. The program does even worse when we consider what it does with women, and I'm going to give you some statistics on that in just a minute.
There were cuts in the mid-1990s in who is eligible and in the amount of benefits that are paid, and things sharply declined. In particular, they reduced the supporting role of EI for women.
EI income support during periods of unemployment, maternity, parental leaves, periods of sickness, or periods of compassionate leave is obviously important in terms of stabilizing and supporting family incomes. It also supports the economic independence of women in their communities, since the benefits are based not on family income, with the exception of a small supplement for low-income families—which, by the way, hasn't been raised for a large number of years, which means fewer and fewer people are able to access it....
Key EI program rules exclude or unfairly penalize women, because they fail to take into proper account the different working patterns of women compared with men. While the great majority of adult women now engage in paid work, the hours they work exclude many from EI benefits, as do periods of time spent away from work caring for children or others.
A study done by Monica Townson and Kevin Hayes, conducted originally for Status of Women Canada, showed that only 32% of unemployed women qualified for regular EI benefits in recent years, compared with 40% of men who were unemployed. Now, 40% for men is also an awful number, but the fact is that women's statistics are even worse. More than 70% of women and 80% of men qualified for benefits before the cuts were imposed in the early 1990s. The gender gap in the proportion of unemployed women and men collecting regular benefits has closed a bit, but it was still two percentage points in November 2008.
The gap is much bigger when it comes to average benefits. In 2006-07, the most recent year for which we have statistics—and there will be new stats coming out, apparently, next month—the average benefit for women was $298 a week, compared with $360 for men. That's a $62-per-week difference.
Women also qualified for shorter periods, on average. In 2005-06, 30% of women exhausted their regular benefits, compared with 26% of men.
Only about one-third of the total dollar amount of regular EI unemployment benefits is paid to women, even though women now participate in the paid workforce at almost the same rate as men.
Just to give you some other comparisons, parental benefits for men are on average $382 a week; for women, $331, a difference of $51 a week.
For sickness benefits, it's $343 for men and $277 for women, a difference of $66 a week.
For compassionate care, it's $364 compared with $318, a difference of $44 per week.
A key difference of the qualifying is that a person has to have worked in the previous year and must have put in between 420 and 700 hours of work, depending on the local unemployment rate. Workers in most large urban areas now have to put in at least 700 hours, roughly the equivalent of 20 weeks of full-time work. Fewer unemployed women qualify than men, because many women take extended leaves from work to care for children or others.
After a two-year absence from the workplace from paid work, the entrance requirement jumps to 910 hours, or more than six months of full-time work. When they work, women are much more likely than men to be employed in part-time, casual, temporary jobs, as opposed to full-time, permanent, year-round jobs providing steady hours. Because they don't have the qualifying hours, only about half of part-time workers who lose their jobs actually qualify for unemployment benefits.
The EI program now provides up to 15 weeks of maternity benefits and 35 weeks of parental benefits, 90% of which are taken by women. Expansion of the maternity and parental leaves stands as a major gain for working women in recent years, especially the 2001 increase in parental benefits from 10 weeks to 35 weeks. However, to qualify, a woman must have worked 600 hours in the previous year. About three-quarters of all women giving birth do qualify, and about 60% claim a benefit. However, a full year of leave is much more likely to be taken by women who qualify for a reasonable benefit and whose employer supplements the EI benefit.
Quebec has recently begun its own EI maternity parental program, which offers much higher benefits and also covers self-employed workers for the first time. I'd also refer you to an article that was written in Chatelaine magazine about a year ago called “Modern Times: The Myth of Mat Leave”, because it quite clearly lays out what the difficulty is here.
The government likes to argue that 80% of all currently employed workers would qualify for regular EI benefits if they were to lose their jobs. However, this ignores the fact that job loss particularly affects those with unstable patterns of work, such as workers on reduced hours before a layoff as well as part-time, temporary, and contract workers. It also ignores the fact that many unemployed workers qualify for EI for a shorter period of time but quickly exhaust their benefits.
In the run-up to the budget, many voices, including those of editorial writers, business leaders, provincial premiers, and the labour movement, endorsed our call for major improvements to the EI system. However, the government has largely failed to listen. The budget did nothing at all about access to benefits. Many workers, especially women, still have to jump that 910-hour hurdle for new entrants: about six months of full-time work. Seven hundred hours are still needed in many regions, and the budget did not improve the level of weekly benefits.
The budget bill did add an extra five weeks of eligibility to all claims, taking the minimum eligibility period from 14 weeks to 19 weeks and raising the maximum in a few high unemployment areas, those with over 10% unemployment, to 50 weeks. However, this is a temporary measure, and it will exhaust in September of 2010. The extension will benefit some unemployed workers, the victims of the recession, but by just $500 million per year in total. This is less than one-sixth of what will be spent on home renovation grants. These are grants, by the way, that unemployed workers won't be able to access, because on three hundred and some dollars a week, you're not going to be spending $10,000 to get a grant back.
The minister says she doesn't want to pay unemployment benefits to workers to just sit around. Quite frankly, this is an insult to many workers, more than a quarter of a million in the last three months, who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own and are now desperately seeking new jobs and training opportunities. It ignores the fact that those who find training places will still need an income on which to live. As a social worker for 17 years, I can say that people who are on unemployment insurance, welfare, or other kinds of social benefits want to be able to contribute. They don't want to be on those benefits. They want a job with a decent level of income.
The Canadian Labour Congress has called for lower entrance requirements of 360 hours of work across the country so that more workers would qualify when they are laid off.
We've called for longer benefits of up to 50 weeks so that fewer unemployed workers will exhaust their claims; higher weekly benefits based on the best 12 weeks—not the most recent 12 weeks, but the best 12 weeks—of earnings before a layoff; and a replacement rate of 60% of insured earnings, which by the way doesn't even get us back to the 1970s levels.
All of these proposals would help women. Reducing the entrance requirement would be particularly important in terms of helping to close the EI gender gap, because, quite frankly, you can do whatever you want to the system and make it look good in some kinds of benefits, but if people can't get access and if they don't have access at a reasonable level, then they're not going to be able to use the EI system.
Thank you.
11:20 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you.
Mr. Battle.
Mr. Battle brought some charts with him, but we cannot distribute them because they're not in both languages. We will translate them and send them out to you later on. But if any one of you wanted to pick one up and look at it, I think you should feel free, because I understand that's what we're going to have to follow in his discussion.
11:20 a.m.
Ken Battle President, Caledon Institute of Social Policy
Yes, thank you, Madam Chair.
I'm sorry about this. We were working on these late last night and I haven't had a chance to translate them all. But I can speak to the graphs and explain them, if that's okay with you, because there is a lot of interesting new information.
11:20 a.m.
President, Caledon Institute of Social Policy
Thanks for the invitation to appear. It's nice to see you again.
I'm going to read a short statement and then get into some of the analysis.
I can see already from Barbara's presentation that there's some overlap between us. I'm going to try to cut some of mine down.
Unemployment insurance has broken the social insurance contract that Canada's social policy pioneers cherished as a crucial element of a modern social security system. Virtually all employees pay EI premiums, but only some can draw upon the program's income benefits and related employment services, if they become unemployed. The flawed social insurance contract effectively discriminates against low-wage workers, most of them working in non-standard jobs. Women fare much worse than men.
Unemployment insurance should act as an automatic economic stabilizer in a modern economy such as Canada's. It must fulfill a dual role during an economic downturn such as we're presently in. It should provide income support by replacing lost wages for the growing ranks of the unemployed, and by injecting money into the economy it should help sustain businesses that rely upon consumer spending. Unfortunately, the measures in the 2009 budget will actually worsen the imbalance in the current employment insurance system, by improving matters somewhat for the minority who manage to qualify for benefits while continuing to do nothing for the majority of unemployed women and men who will remain excluded from the program.
We cannot simply turn back the clock and restore the old unemployment insurance system. We have to look at more radical reforms that go beyond EI to include welfare and supports for the working poor. In short, we need a new architecture of benefits for working-age adults.
The story of EI might be familiar to you by now. It's a program that started in 1940. At that time, it covered about 40-some percent of the workforce. It was a fairly small program. Over the years it expanded until 1971, when Bryce Mackasey was the minister who brought in the modern unemployment insurance program, which covered virtually the entire workforce, with the exception of the self-employed.
What happened in the 1980s and 1990s was that there was growing criticism of the unemployment insurance program. That led in the 1990s to a series of restrictions and cuts in EI. I can't go into them now, but the last one, of course, was the 1996 change from “unemployment insurance” to “employment insurance”, a truly Orwellian shift in words. We're now seeing the result of the constrictions that occurred back in the 1990s.
If you look at the coverage of the unemployed and the percentage of unemployed receiving regular EI benefits—I'm focusing on the regular unemployment benefits—we've seen a phenomenal decline in the benefits over the years. In 2008, we're down to 43%, so 43% of all unemployed Canadians qualify for regular EI benefits.
If we look at women versus men, of course a smaller percentage of women qualify for benefits, and the gap between the sexes has been increasing over the last six or seven years: there's a wider gap for coverage between men and women. In 2008, only 39.1% of unemployed women received benefits, as opposed to 44.5% of jobless men.
We've looked at a measure that constructs a ratio of the coverage of men to women, whereby “1” would be equality and anything lower.... We can see that over time the gap between men and women has been increasing. More men than women receive unemployment insurance as well, although when we track them over time, looking at the effect of the business cycle, the shapes are about the same for men and women.
What we see, if we compare EI recipients with the number of unemployed, is a widening gap between those who get benefits and those who don't, and women are worst off.
We looked at coverage of employment insurance by major cities in Canada, and the picture is quite shocking. About 30% of unemployed are eligible for benefits in Canada's major cities. Just to give an example, in Calgary 20.8% of men qualify and 17.1% of women. If we look at Toronto, it's 24.8% of men and 23.7% of women. So in the large cities, where eight in ten Canadians live, the majority of the unemployed get no support from employment insurance. And again, the situation is worse for women than for men.
When we look at the differences by province, the variations are absolutely staggering. In Alberta, 23.4% of unemployed receive benefits; we are looking at virtually 100% in Newfoundland. In Ontario and the provinces west, an increasingly lower percentage of unemployed receive benefits.
Why is this? Barbara alluded to it: the variable entrance requirement. This is the feature of employment insurance that turns it into a three-dimensional chess game. Not only do the work requirements vary by 58 regional unemployment areas across Canada, but so does the duration of benefits.
You can have an example—just to give you the extreme example—where you have two unemployed Canadians with the same earnings. The one living in a region with a high unemployment rate will receive more benefits than the same person with the same earnings in a low unemployment region. In fact, you could have a situation where one person gets absolutely nothing from unemployment insurance and the other person qualifies for benefits.
The other problem with this unequal access to the income benefits, of course, is that the related training and employment services are also connected with EI, so that the problem of access is not just the income benefits; it is also some of the employment benefits that are related to it.
Why do we see this gap between men and women? The main reason has to do with the different labour market experience of women, and this is, I think, quite well known now: the growth of non-standard employment—self-employment, part-time employment, multiple job holders. These are people who rarely qualify for employment insurance, because they don't meet the rules, because their work experience tends to be fragmented and unstable.
We see a gender difference there as well. About 34% of Canadians overall work in non-standard jobs, but for women it is 40%, versus 29% for men. Women are much more vulnerable to unemployment and they tend to move in and out of the workforce, including time spent raising children and caring for other family members.
These gender differences also translate when we look at benefits, and Barbara mentioned that. The maximum benefit for EI is $447 in 2009; in 1995 it was $595, in inflation-adjusted terms: $447 now, $595 back ten years ago. So there is a real decline in the maximum benefits payable.
When we look at average benefits, in 2007 the average weekly benefit for women who got EI was $298; for men $360. For women, that would leave them $4,544 below the poverty line; for men $1,754 below the poverty line. So we're not looking at generous benefits by any means.
Concerning duration of benefits, women are more likely, if they receive EI, to get benefits for a short or medium term; men are more apt to get benefits over the long term.
In the percentage of EI beneficiaries who exhaust their benefits we also see a gender difference: 30.4% of women exhaust their EI, versus only 26% of men.
Moving on from EI, I want to talk a little about welfare and EI. Then, I promise, I'll stop.
What's been happening in Canada is that employment insurance, which is supposed to be the social program of first resort, is actually being overshadowed by welfare in a number of provinces. We have a lot more people who are getting support from welfare, people who are unemployed, than people who are getting EI. Of course, welfare is supposed to be the program of last resort, not first resort.
Expenditures in welfare and EI have almost come together, even though welfare is supposed to be a small program for those who don't qualify for EI or are unable to get work.
The question is, what do we do? How do we reform?
11:30 a.m.
President, Caledon Institute of Social Policy
Okay.
Barbara mentioned the CLC's recommendations, and I was going to mention those. The difference between Caledon and the CLC and others is that although we agree with the improvements that CLC and other groups have recommended, over the long term we believe that's not enough. We have to create a new employment insurance program.
We would keep the current employment insurance, giving it a larger earnings replacement capacity, and we would add a new program, which would be an income-tested benefit--we're calling it a temporary income program--that would serve people who don't qualify for EI.
In other words, we would have now a two-part system. One part would be employment insurance, funded through premiums the way it is now, but it would be a stronger program. It would not have variable entrance requirements. There wouldn't be the perversion of the regional aspect to it. And there would be a new income-tested program, funded through general revenues--this again would be a federal one--that would help unemployed people who aren't able to qualify for an employment insurance program.
That's a fairly radical change. We're working on that. It's part of a larger architecture where we also replace welfare with new programs and get these programs working together both federally and provincially.
Thank you.
11:30 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you very much.
Madame Harvey or Madame Dépatie, who would like to go first?
11:30 a.m.
Representative, Conseil national des chômeurs et chômeuses
I will begin.
Good morning everyone. My name is Danie Harvey and I am with the Conseil national des chômeurs et chômeuses. On behalf of the organization, I thank you for having invited us.
Our organization comprises several groups of unemployed, some of which have 30 years' experience in the defence of the rights of the unemployed. For several years now, we have been on the front lines of several public awareness campaigns aimed at not only denouncing the misappropriation of the employment insurance fund but also, and especially, at demanding a better employment insurance system. We therefore wish, through the lens of our demands, to share with you changes that could be brought to the employment insurance system in order that women might, in our view, benefit from an effective system.
The labour market is undergoing major economic changes that are having a negative impact on the reality of women. Non traditional jobs are more numerous and various economic sectors are being affected. Some 40.2 percent of working women occupy part-time, temporary, on-call or occasional jobs or else are self-employed or work at home. In cases of job loss, 59 percent of women do not have access to employment insurance because they have not accumulated a sufficient number of hours to be eligible. They therefore must hold down several jobs simultaneously in order to make ends meet, manage difficult schedules and, in some cases — in that of seasonal occupations, for example —, over a very short timeframe, of approximately 14 work weeks, these women will have to work seven days a week.
I come from the Charlevoix region, which is characterized by a seasonal economy. I often see women holding down three or four jobs, working seven days a week for 14 weeks minimum, and sometimes even maximum. If the eligibility criteria were reduced, this would facilitate employment insurance eligibility because, I repeat, 59 percent of women are unable to access these benefits. The number of hours must be reduced and there should be a standard uniform requirement of 350 hours no matter where one lives, given the striking contradictions that, in our view, exist at present. Two employees in one and the same workplace, for example, could find themselves with different access rights to unemployment insurance depending on their place of residence. This is something that we often see in our work. We wonder at the existence of such absolutely arbitrary differences between regions. Is the loss of one's job not of the same import for everyone, no matter what your civic address is?
We all know that women account for more than 60 percent of low-income workers. We also know that they account for 46 percent of all salaried workers. Given this reality, should we not be questioning the relevance of maintaining the waiting period? What is its purpose, if only to deepen poverty even further? Some women must combine several jobs and when they manage to put a little bit of money aside, the waiting period eats up all of the hard-won savings put away during the period of employment, given that they must continue to pay rent and buy groceries. The elimination of the waiting period has become a self-evident need as it is a useless and absurd administrative delay that deprives of an income people who are already seriously impoverished by the loss of their job.
Further, the employment insurance benefit rate of 55 percent it too has disastrous economic consequences. When a person has worked at minimum wage, his or her employment insurance benefits amount to $4.68 an hour, which is not even enough to buy a pound of butter. We all know full well that such is the lot of many women, who on top of everything else may also be single parents.
According to Statistics Canada, a single woman must work close to 51 hours a week in order to reach the low income cut-off. For a single parent woman with two children, this means 78 hours of work a week in order to escape from poverty. How can one make ends meet when, before receiving the first benefit cheque, more than a whole month may go by?
In the case of seasonal summer work, it must be stated that the loss of one's job often coincides with the beginning of the school year. Ladies, we sincerely believe that the employment insurance system must be changed and improved so as to better respond to the needs of workers. Access must be eased, unlocked, as an editorial writer from La Presse stated, with the establishment of a single eligibility criterion. The benefit rate must be increased by basing it on the 12 best weeks. The waiting period must, further, be abolished. Such measures would be responsible and would assist those workers, male and female, who lose their job.
Before concluding, I would also like to share with you another situation that must be brought to light, that of informal care givers. These are women who, often, must leave their job in order to care for a child, an aged parent or a relative who is ill. The act provides that these women may receive employment insurance benefits, but they are refused access because they are not available for work. I work with several community groups of women suffering from cancer or other serious illnesses, and there is a situation that is often reported to me. To give you an example that is typical in my region of Charlevoix, I would tell you that people must do 600 hours of work in order to be eligible for employment insurance benefits. It is the same everywhere, but in our area, seasonal work can provide 450 to 525 hours tops.
How can one be eligible for employment insurance sickness benefits without the 600 required hours? If you are suffering from cancer, you are fighting for your life, and you require more than 15 weeks to recover. I mention cancer, but it could be a case of serious depression, which takes just as much time to recover from. There are things to be done in the area of sickness benefits in order to help women more.
There is in society broad consensus for demanding such improvements from the government, especially in times of crisis and economic difficulties like those we are living today.
Thank you.
11:40 a.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
Okay. Thank you very much.
There are still almost four minutes left. Did you wish to speak to that, Madame Dépatie?
11:40 a.m.
Micheline Dépatie Representative, Conseil national des chômeurs et chômeuses
My name is Micheline Dépatie, and I am from Saint-Hyacinthe, in Quebec. I am single.
I have been in the labour market since the age of 15. Among other things, I worked 39 hours a week for 25 years in a grocery store. We went through a labour dispute following a management demand that we be available seven days and seven evenings, without any guaranteed number of hours. This is what retail and grocery superstore workers are enduring at present. This prevents them from holding down two jobs.
After the labour dispute, the grocery store closed. But at 50 years of age, it was not an easy thing for me to find another job. Because of all this stress, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and diabetes, which limited me to working a maximum of 25 hours a week. I am nevertheless intent upon working in order to retain my morale and my pride. I do not want to be dependent upon the State.
Today, I have a job at the cafeteria of l'Institut de technologie agroalimentaire de Saint-Hyacinthe. This job allows me to work only five hours a day. It is a seasonal job, but my hours fit those of the students and I am off during the summer. When I started this job, I worked 25 hours a week, but because of today's economic climate, I have been cut 15 to 9 hours per week, with an hourly wage of $8.64.
I filled in my employment insurance application form in December. For this year, I am entitled to 21 weeks at $144. At present, with 9 or 15 hours, I will not be able to accumulate the 600 or 700 hours required to be eligible for employment insurance. This situation is hard on my morale and stressful. I have had to leave my dwelling, become an informal care giver and move in with my mother in order to take care of her and save money.
I would like to see the number of hours as well as the waiting period reduced. It is not easy, when one finds oneself jobless, to have to wait five weeks before receiving a small cheque for $144. You do what you can to accumulate the required number of hours but you cannot afford to fall ill nor stray one iota off course. With every pay cheque, you count your hours to verify your eligibility. I would like to see you reduce the number of hours required to be eligible for employment insurance, as well as the number of weeks one has to wait.
Thank you.
11:40 a.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
Okay. Thank you very much to all of our presenters.
We'll now go to the first round of questioning of seven minutes.
Madame Zarac, please.
11:40 a.m.
Liberal
Lise Zarac Liberal LaSalle—Émard, QC
Welcome to all of our witnesses. Thank you very much for being here.
Everyone agrees: the current employment insurance program does not fit the needs. Proof of this is the fact that 43 percent of the unemployed are unable to benefit from it. This must be frustrating for those who have paid into it. It is as if you paid for home insurance, there was a fire and you were unable to collect anything. On top of that, as you have stated, this money goes back into the economy; it is an economic stimulant. I find this very unfortunate.
My first question is for Mr. Battle. You outlined a new way of looking at things. A previous witness told us that it would be really interesting to separate employment insurance from maternity leave. You stated that 90 percent of parental leave benefits are used by women. I see a correlation here.
Are women using these benefits because they are the ones who care for their families? Do you believe that these two things should be separated?
11:45 a.m.
President, Caledon Institute of Social Policy
Yes, I'm glad you asked that. I didn't have much time to get into this.
There's a massive project that we've been working on for the last couple of years looking at what we've called architecture, as you said. One of the problems, when we talk about unemployment insurance, a major program of support, is that we then have welfare, and they don't connect at all, and yet these are two massive, expensive programs that are supposed to be helping Canadians who are unemployed.
As you said, our proposal would be that instead of a single unemployment insurance program like what we have now, there would be two programs. The current employment insurance program would be more of a social insurance program, because as you said, the social insurance contract between Canadians who have contributed and the government has broken down.
It is absolutely shocking that you have a major program that is now covering 43% of the unemployed. It's unbelievable. People are getting shortchanged; they are not getting their money's worth. We would have unemployment insurance—a stronger unemployment insurance. The current earnings replacement rate is 55%, which is very low; we would like to see it up to 70% or 75%. It used to be 66%, back in the 1970s. That EI program would not have a regional component, which I think is a perverse feature of the current system and very unfair in its treatment of Canadians.
The problem is that you're still going to have people who are moving in and out of the workforce or who can only find short-term or part-time work, or who only want that kind of work, and who are never really going to fit under a social insurance program like unemployment insurance. Our thinking here is to create a different kind of program that will help them, so that between the two programs we would be covering all of the unemployed Canadians.
One option for parental maternity benefits would be to move them out of employment insurance into this new program we're talking about, the temporary income program, so that people could get benefits that way. As you know, Quebec has moved into a similar kind of reform, which I think is good.
It's also possible that we could attach other so-called special benefits to this new program. The new program would not be based on premiums the way unemployment insurance is. It would just be based on general revenue, like other programs such as old age pensions.
I'll have to stop there, but we've also envisaged changes to welfare whereby this new federal temporary income program would relieve the provinces of a lot of their welfare caseload and enable the provinces to focus more on employment preparation. We have a kind of architecture that takes different pieces. But you're absolutely right.
My concern is that even if we make the entrance requirement uniform—concerning which I agree with the CCLC—and make the duration and the calculation of benefits better, we're still going to have a large number of unemployed Canadians who will simply not fit into that kind of program. That's our thinking.
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
11:45 a.m.
Liberal
Lise Zarac Liberal LaSalle—Émard, QC
I will ask my second question. Approximately half of the money collected is devoted to training. However, most women do not participate in the training program. In my view, training is a good thing, because it allows women to find better jobs and learn new technologies.
Do you find that 50 percent is too much? Could this money be used to improve the criteria?
11:50 a.m.
Executive Vice-President, Canadian Labour Congress
One of the difficulties is that when you take a look at some of the traditional training—apprenticeship, for example—96% of apprenticeship dollars go to men. Again, there's a whole other discussion about women in the trades. We keep bumping back into the question of access, whether it's 350 hours or 360 hours, because you can't get the training if you don't get the access. You're exactly back where you were, no matter what you do. You can say that we're going to improve the training and going to improve opportunities for women, but if they can't get access, you'll just keep coming back to it.
I want to add that when the government changed from weeks' accumulation to hours' accumulation, the labour movement supported it, because we thought part-time workers should be able to pay into it and should be able to access it.
11:50 a.m.
Conservative
11:50 a.m.
Executive Vice-President, Canadian Labour Congress
Okay. But just on that, we didn't anticipate that the governments were going to make the access by hours so high that people paying into it can't get it.
My last example is that there was a women who worked at a Canada Safeway in Regina, Saskatchewan, a number of years ago, who said she had had two children, one under the week system and one under the hours system. She didn't realize the change. She said we had a prime minister who said the government had no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Well, guess what? The government is back in the bedrooms of the nation, because it makes a difference in when she can have her children.
11:50 a.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
Thank you.
We'll move now to Madame Demers, please, for seven minutes.
11:50 a.m.
Bloc
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Battle, Ladies, thank you for having accepted to meet with us in order to help us better understand the employment insurance problem.
Last week, we heard representatives from Statistics Canada. There is quite a spread between the data they provided to us and these numbers. I am having difficulty understanding why. For example, the percentage of persons who would be eligible for employment insurance was 48 percent for women, whereas you have talked to us about 32 percent. In the case of men, the proportion was 53 percent. The combined total for those unemployed who be eligible for employment insurance was approximately 57 percent. The numbers we were given also indicated that most women who work part time, 78.4 percent, do so wilfully, for reasons other than financial. This percentage was of 75.4 for men.
It is my belief that Statistics Canada is recognized worldwide as being one of the most competent authorities in the area of statistics. I have been listening to you and Ms. Dépatie, and saying to myself that the picture you are painting here is very different. How is it that there are so many disparities? Could you explain that to me?