Well, I can start the discussion on that.
I think there are several countries in Europe.... The committee would well know that the Scandinavian countries in general are quite ahead of us in this regard while maintaining high economic growth. Both at an economic level and a social policy level, they set a kind of standard. In addition, England, certainly during the Blair administration, moved quite dramatically to address a lot of these issues, some of them successfully, some of them less so, but nevertheless they did experiment and have come up with some measures of success.
It so happens that Wendy Thomson, who is one of the people who headed up that initiative in England, now lives in Montreal--McGill University. It might be worthwhile talking to her to get some better sense of what's going on and what went on there. She certainly is in touch with what's going on there currently, so you'd have a good sense from that.
Other initiatives have been taking place, both in France and in the Netherlands, in terms of these kinds of initiatives now. France has run into a lot of difficulty because of their income security programs--the high level of them--and as a consequence, they are trying to get people back to work, and so on. Again, one of the programs there that have been relatively successful is for employment of women, particularly middle-aged women.
One of the problems you talked about is not only the 55- to 64-year-olds, but particularly when you get down to the lower ranges there, women still can contribute quite significantly to the economy, so you don't have to write it off as an income transfer there. Perhaps with the 60- to 64-year-olds that's the case, and I would agree with what Richard said earlier, that the allowance and trying to extend that down to single women and so on would probably take care of that cohort.
Generally I would say most northern European countries have welfare systems that frankly, on the whole, are not much better than our own, but they have far fewer people on welfare than we do. And it's because of these other kinds of initiatives, particularly employment market initiatives and other kinds of income transfers for family and child care, that they keep people out of welfare, including these people you were talking about.