I can answer a few of those. I can't speak to EI. It's not my area of expertise.
In terms of the welfare wall, it depends on how you look at it. There is an issue of equity between low-income working people and people on social assistance, and there was a feeling in the mid-1990s that programs should offer incentives so that it actually makes financial sense to take a job. It wasn't just the dollars; it was that social assistance had a lot of ancillary benefits and services—dental, health, and supplementary health benefits. If you left social assistance and went into low-paid work, you wouldn't get those benefits. So that's the diagnostic around the welfare wall.
I think it has been reduced. I do think low-income working people have more benefits now. Our work on the working poor shows that there are still some gaps in terms of what low-income workers get, in terms of the supplementary health benefits and that, but it's much more comparable, and a lot of provinces have provided those types of benefits based on a test of income rather than tying them specifically to the receipt of social assistance.
In terms of the working income tax benefit, you're absolutely right that if you're working full time, the full year, for example, in Ontario, with minimum wage, your income would be over the threshold. One of the objectives of the WITB was to provide an incentive to get back to.... Its explicit rationale was to address the welfare wall. It was an incentive to get people from social assistance to help them make work pay. So it has dual objectives, to provide an incentive for people to enter the labour force from social assistance and for some people in the labour force. I think about 1.2 million low-income working Canadians actually get some benefits from WITB.