Thank you.
Again, as everybody else said, I want to thank you for coming this morning. This is, I think, a very important discussion, given, as has been said already, that there hasn't been much consultation so far on what I think is a fairly significant move with regard to a vehicle the government has had and has used over a number of years now to create some stability in various regions of the country and in various sectors of our economy. I think we have to be very careful of what we do in that respect.
I appreciated the comments, particularly by Mr. Hanson and Mr. Murphy, in terms of the wider impact that this is going to have. I know in my part of the world, in northern Ontario, we're very dependent on forestry. Right now forestry is in big difficulty. We have communities shutting down. People who have worked 40 to 50 years, who have made investments in homes and cottages, and some of them in small business, are now finding they're losing all of that investment, and they're moving on because they need work to look after their families. I don't know a worker I've come across in my 18 years in public life who doesn't want to work, who doesn't want to have a job. They don't want to be on EI, they don't want to be on welfare; they want to work to support their families. They see EI as a way to bridge that period of time when, through no fault of their own, they find themselves without employment.
So this has a huge impact on the broader community. If all of a sudden this EI fund changes--as it has actually over the last 10 or 15 years--and becomes less generous, the whole community suffers. When there's a downturn in the economy, the only source of income in a small community--I'm sure in Cape Breton or northern Ontario, or in many parts of rural Canada--are some of these government programs that put money in people's pockets. They then almost immediately spend it in the small business sector of that community, buying groceries, paying the rent, and that kind of thing. For us to make this change on, I think, some very narrow grounds and with some very narrow concerns worries me because it also affects each of these people personally.
If we're going to have a good economy—and everybody who talks about this agrees—we have to have a workforce that's ready, willing, motivated, and trained. If you have somebody who has gone on EI because they're 50 or 55 years old and they don't see it within their ability to move to Alberta, to get another job, they want to stay where they are, they end up eventually on welfare, which is what happens in many instances--too many instances. It then becomes much more expensive to lift them back up again and get them into the system and get them working when the economy returns.
I'd like some further comment from you in terms of what changes we might suggest to this new initiative, in terms of this new crown corporation to administer EI, to make sure we capture some of those concerns.
