Yes, and thank you for the very good question.
Certainly our Commonwealth partners were ahead of us in dealing really with the redressment, making sure that all society bears some of the cost for our reservists when they serve our nation both here and abroad.
In the Australia case, they ended up building a program whereby they apparently gave a cash reimbursement to employers, where in some cases employers actually made money with reservists. In other words, they would actually try to encourage people to become soldiers and sign up, and employers made a profit.
This is not the intent of what we propose. Our proposal is to basically scale it so that smaller employers receive the median wage in Canada. So we take a look at between $50,000 and $60,000 and we say that we will pay a small employer 80% of that—so that the employer is still sharing some of the burden—and we scale down for a very large employer to receive, say, 40% of that median wage. In so doing we will avoid the problem the Australians had.
The British have a far better reimbursement government-rebate-type program and that makes an awful lot of sense. What we are suggesting is that HRSDC perhaps administer this program. That's what we advocate.
Thank you.