I'd like to address that, if I could.
When you buy house insurance and your house burns to the ground, the insurance company builds you a new house, regardless of how much money you have in the bank. When people put money into the unemployment system, which is collected by the government, it's in trust for them until they have a time of layoff.
I come from the auto industry, where we have long periods of downtime, and people end up collecting. When we get back to work, for the balance of the year you may end up making enough that you exceed the threshold. Because of that, come income tax time, people are faced with thousands of dollars of debt they owe the government, because they collected from a system they paid into. They shouldn't be penalized for that, when, if you look back over the last two years, the EI surplus has been about $3 billion per year. That money belongs to the workers. If I lose my job tomorrow, why should I be penalized because I have a good-paying job? I don't think that's fair.
As for the two weeks of waiting time, that was initially put in place a long time ago by what was the Unemployment Insurance Commission. It was designed because when you lost your job today, tomorrow you went and stood in line, filled out forms, and handed them to somebody who had to process the paperwork. It took time to get you into the system. Today that's all been downloaded onto the worker. If you lose your job today, tomorrow you can go online and fill out your forms. You do all the work yourself. If you go into the unemployment office, you go to a computer and you do all the work yourself. You input it right into the system. So why are there two weeks when you have to go without any benefit? You're not allowed to work during that time.