Ladies and gentlemen members of Parliament, thank you very much for your invitation.
You have received my notes, but I had to make some adjustments to my testimony as a result of Monday's budget.
We all know that since March 2020 the pandemic has shaken the labour world and the economy, forcing, in 2020 alone, nearly nine million people into unemployment. This number should never be forgotten. Almost nine million people received the Canada emergency response benefit in 2020. Last year, 45% of the workforce lost their jobs at some point. The world of work and the economy was hit with a shock almost unheard of in recent history, other than the 1929 crash and subsequent Great Depression.
There are two key lessons from last year: first, the crisis has exposed the flaws in the employment insurance program, which should have immediately played the role expected of it and helped people who lost their jobs. Instead, employment insurance collapsed and had to be quickly replaced by emergency programs, such as the Canada emergency response benefit and the Canada emergency wage subsidy.
With the CERB ending at the end of September 2020, the employment insurance program was put back on track. People had time to think. Flexible measures were created that were ingenious and welcome. Other income support programs were put in place, administered by the agency—