In particular, Madame, I'll speak of the employment benefit support measures under Service Canada, called employment assistance services. In our province, up until January, a person had to be independent of all support needs after six months. Now that means if you were visually impaired, they'd take away your cane. If you were mobility impaired, they'd take away your wheelchair. What they were saying was that in six months you had to be better. This is the absolute truth. This is from Service Canada.
We now have a process whereby we engage Service Canada at a local level and at a national level to change this. We now have an agreement that demonstrates these programs no longer work in opposition, whereby if you are not EI eligible, you can't get a service. Right now, all Canadians who require services in our province, who have a developmental disability, would be able to seek them out, in particular programs that make them EI eligible.
If you had been locked up in an institution for forty years and got let out just because somebody thought it was a good idea, and they didn't give any thought to what you were going to do for employment, and if you've never worked--so you have never had EI--you're never going to work, because the federal government doesn't even count you.
That's the critical point. Programs have to be open. This barrier of EI eligibility and parental clawbacks has to be removed. We have $40 billion in the EI part two fund. What are we doing with it? I know a certain percentage goes to general revenue. But we have to remember that this is Canadian workers' money. They want to make sure there are more workers to take their place. We talked about the baby boomers and the aging population. Who's going to look after us?
Programs need to work at a federal and a provincial level. We can cooperate. It's not always easy, but we've made a success of it in this province--absolutely. Those are the things that have to change.