He's very vocal, yes.
He said that when people get laid off or they lose their job and they're on EI, if they're a plumber or a pipefitter or whatever, they still have a sense of confidence about who they are and usually feel they're simply moving from one job to another. If they stay on EI too long and they fall off onto welfare, they go into another category altogether. It becomes a poverty of spirit that happens to them. They lose contact with their old colleagues at work, their family starts to look at them a little weird, like “What's the problem with you?” Eventually they have to start borrowing money, and then nobody wants to talk to them. So the further down you drive people into poverty, the harder it is to get them out of it.
So it seems to me that extending EI to more people, the part-time people and so on, would actually be a good thing in terms of simply keeping people moving, because once they get stuck in a rut, then too many things build up. It becomes much more difficult and, I would suggest for everybody, much more expensive in the long run. I refer to the costs in terms of health care, and oftentimes they end up in the criminal justice system because we criminalize poverty now more and more, and that kind of thing.
I'd like to hear from Christine and from Dan on that, or Leigh.