Could I speak very briefly to the incentives to work issue?
I guess at the time of EI reform there were a number of background studies done for the department. One key result of those studies was that one reason the employment rate in Canada was higher than the rate in the U.S. traditionally through the eighties and nineties is that in fact people are more likely to work in Canada, under a relatively generous EI system, for the obvious reason that you don't qualify for benefits if you don't work. So the employment rate in rural New Brunswick is higher than in parts of rural Maine—or was—where the system didn't exist.
The other point I would make, and I think this is an important one, is that the labour movement has never said that the duration of benefits should not vary with the local unemployment rate. It's reasonable that people in high unemployment regions should get a longer duration of benefits simply because it's harder to find another job.
I mean, what's important about the 360 hours is to put everybody in the country on the same basis. You can very easily live in a low unemployment city and experience a bout of unemployment through no fault of your own--the SARS epidemic, for example. So we think it's absolutely critical that the 360 hours, that entrance to the system, should not depend on local labour market circumstances, but it is reasonable to condition duration of benefits.