Thank you very much.
First of all, we have to recognize that fewer than 50% of workers in Canada are covered by EI. That's another shocking statistic, and in some provinces it's less than that.
In the old days, it used to be that a job was your first form of income security, and then if you fell out of a job, you fell onto EI, and that was your next form of income security. And then, if you fell off EI, you fell onto welfare. But now that's switched. We have more people on welfare than we have on EI. So the access issue with respect to EI is very difficult for most workers, because they don't have it.
Using the funds that are there is really looking at less than half the workforce in Canada. It means that the way the program is designed doesn't match the way people are now working. We have a very different kind of work history and work pattern, especially for some of these vulnerable workers we've been talking about who are less educated, are in lower status jobs, and have more bouts of unemployment. They just don't have access to it. As we said about Pedro, who has EI, he's going to be one of the lucky ones because he's going to have access to adult skills building and training. But those people like Nadia and Debbie who are not covered by EI because of their work hours, because of their lack of work experience, do not have access to it.
Coming back to the expenditures issues and ways that we can build incentives, I think we need to look at other models, not just EI, because it is not going to address the majority of our workers in Canada.