Human Resources committee  It's just because I'm from Saskatchewan. One of the things is that the unemployment rate in Saskatchewan has gone up. I still get the notices from the Leader-Post and so on, so I still keep up with the news at home. But the other part of it is, if we're talking about real labour shortages, one of the ways to deal with them—and our people in the construction industry constantly tell us this—is to bring in mobility assistance for them through the UI system.

Human Resources committee  I think the reality is that nobody wants to be at home not contributing. I think Carol Hughes already said this earlier. We all want to contribute in whatever way we can. I don't want to do an age scan in this room, but maybe some people are still living with the old 1960s kind of statement about....

Human Resources committee  I think we've been clear in our documents and also in the discussion that obviously the 360 hours are vitally important. You can design the best EI system in the world, but if people can't access it because the threshold is too high, then you have a really nice document, but it doesn't really do anything for anybody.

Human Resources committee  Just briefly, the 360 hours is not some sort of number we drew out of a hat. It's based on 12 weeks at an average of 30 hours a week. Again, as I say, we didn't make this number up. It's based on some statistics about the average work week, and so on. But you're right. There are people who are holding down two, three, or four part-time jobs to try to keep their family afloat.

Human Resources committee  Over the years, we've done about three sort of in-depth studies, I think, using Statistics Canada's work around the loss of finances to communities because of the UI changes. Certainly in our last one that we did, which is a few years ago now, there was an analysis of what the gender breakdown was as well.

Human Resources committee  It would appear that the bill does.

Human Resources committee  Our position is that people, no matter where they live, should have access to up to 50 weeks of benefits. Quite clearly that has been our position.

Human Resources committee  I just want to make one comment. We can sit in this room talking about what took place today, yesterday, 13 years ago, 15 years ago, or whatever, or what will take place tomorrow. There are 200,000 we've had in here in a year who we can say would be brought into the system, but quite frankly, right now they're being kept out of the system.

Human Resources committee  We wouldn't if we were drafting the bill, but nobody asked us to draft it.

Human Resources committee  No, I think we've been very clear that uniform access should be a permanent measure and it should be for all points across the country. When the change was made in the 1990s to, first of all, require employers whose employees worked more than 15 hours a week to pay into EI, because you'll recall that before that they didn't, we actually supported the change from weeks to hours because we thought this would actually open the door for a lot of people, for the people I talked about, women and young workers, who had periods of unemployment.

Human Resources committee  I just wanted to add that we said that the average benefit today is very low: $348 a week. First, I can't see people rushing to get $348 a week, when you look at it—and remember, that's the average. A lot of the people we would be bringing into the system would be people who are not working full time, so their benefit would be considerably lower.

Human Resources committee  Thanks very much. Merci beaucoup. The Canadian Labour Congress welcomes and urges all parties to support this important bill. The bill would modestly increase EI benefits to 55% of earnings--as now--but calculated on the basis of the best 12 weeks over the previous year. We welcome the proposed move to the best 12 weeks, but we continue to urge a benefit rate of at least 60%.

Status of Women committee  Just to add to that, the reality is that people with higher incomes who can afford to now contribute to RRSPs are doing better because they're getting a tax break as well, which somebody at a lower income who doesn't have a pension plan doesn't get. Again, I go back to why we think there needs to be a summit, so that we can start to sort some of these details out so that people feel that what we're developing is a better system for all, not addressed to only one group or another.

Status of Women committee  If I could comment briefly, this is a bit like the discussion about women who work part time wanting to work part time. The reality is that most of them want a full-time, full-year job. I was recently in a restaurant and an older man was taking the dishes off. I don't know how old he was, but he was working very hard.

Status of Women committee  Certainly we can have Joel come back and talk to people in more detail. I don't have the pages in the French version, but if you do look at our longer document, beginning on page 16 in the English version, it's the third point, about protecting Canadian pensions through a federal system of pension insurance.