Thank you very much for the question and also for the kind words on the little plain language guide that I put together. I'm glad that it's been of help. Thanks again to you, your constituency office, and indeed to all the constituency staff of all the members of the committee. It really is an unsung but incredibly important service that MPs are providing.
As I said in my testimony, I don't think constituency offices can do it alone. I also take your point that the navigation of some of this information should properly be delivered by government officials themselves. The public servants who are actually the subject matter experts ought to be doing a better job. Certainly, we can do some of that, but I think there is also an important issue with regard to public trust. In terms of some of the populations that you just mentioned, where do they turn and where do they feel they can be served with trust? It's often non-profit organizations that are directly in their community and that offer a range of services. At the end of the day, we're going to need multiple touch points because people enter into programs and have complex lives and they need multiple entry points.
You also raised the issue of the simplicity of CERB. It was made possible only by having a more simple design. The employment insurance system in normal times is used to processing, and capable of processing, approximately five claims per minute. CERB, on the other hand, had to be designed in a way—and successfully was—to be able to process 1,000 claims per minute. We do have these in-built tradeoffs between handling volume and handling tiny nuances and tweaks and changes.
As we go forward, as we think about entering into a transition—and as I said, that transition is happening at different times, according to community, according to sector, and according to gender—to the extent that we can, if we can keep programs as simple as possible, it will make it easier for users to navigate them and makes it more possible for administrators to deliver them quickly and to reach the kinds of volumes that we're going to need to continue to reach for the next several months.
I think that's an important principle. As I said in my remarks, part of reconciling having greater flexibility built into programs and being responsive to individual differences while maintaining simplicity is that we're going to have to continue to trust Canadians, that rather than expecting fraud around every corner.... The C.D. Howe Institute just had a paper out today suggesting that perhaps this is the way to reconcile it, to continue to rely on things like attestations rather than waiting for people to jump through multiple hoops before we give them a dollar of help.