Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to go back to the point about the witnesses. The witnesses from the department were not called to testify on this bill, and therefore we don't have the detailed costed information that will allow us to make an informed decision. And to suggest that one individual member of the opposition has fully costed this out and presented all the risk analysis and information around the financial implications of this is I think a little trite.
The fact is the department has not conducted its full analysis. To Monsieur Godin's points that they haven't done it now and therefore we should just get on with the bill, if we had called the department as official witnesses, I have no doubt that the professional public service would have delivered an appropriate analysis in time for a committee meeting had we called them as witnesses. But we chose not to.
So we are in some ways making decisions here about a significant piece of legislation without any evidence or information from the department, the very people who are the experts on these sorts of things and the very people who can fully cost things out and who have been working on these files for years. I think in some ways it's foolish for us to support something like this when we don't have all the evidence in front of us.
The second point I want to make has to do with the basic notions of equality and ensuring that federal government social programs are designed for all Canadians. The fact of the matter is that the uptake on employment insurance is much lower in places like Toronto; in other words, the percentage of the unemployed in cities like Toronto who are eligible for employment insurance benefits is much lower than in other parts of the country.
Empirically, I can tell you the fact is the people who are most disadvantaged by this are immigrants, newcomers to Canada who are settling in the GTA, because they disproportionately participate in parts of the economy where they do not pay into employment insurance.
Right now we have a system that's in place, yes--15 weeks--but what you're proposing, Mr. Godin, is to exaggerate that inequality to an even greater extent by extending it to 50 weeks, and that's not fair for some of the most vulnerable in our society, immigrants, who have come here, who have chosen to make this country their home, and who are not eligible disproportionately for these kinds of benefits because of the types of work they're in, because they're disproportionately starting up small businesses, because they're entrepreneurs, because of a whole range of other socio-economic factors.
So we're of the position that this needs to be studied to a much greater extent. We acknowledge as a government that the issue of the gap in sickness benefits is one that merits attention and merits study, but to do so on the basis of no information from the department, no analysis, is foolish. And furthermore, to do so in a way that would simply widen the inequality gap between Canadians and our most recent immigrants I think is completely unfair and I don't think speaks to the values that we hold as Canadians.
I think that's the second reason why we should oppose this bill, because it doesn't take into account the fact that many Canadians don't pay into employment insurance, and those Canadians disproportionately, especially in areas like Toronto, are immigrants.