Thanks, Chair.
Minister, thank you very much for coming. You have made yourself available to this committee on a number of occasions, quite voluntarily, which I appreciate; I think we all do. Thank you for that.
In terms of the background on this issue, as you know, we had proposed some hearings on this new Employment Insurance Commission. Even among many people who support the idea of a separate fund for EI, there are concerns about just how arm's-length this commission is going to be. While we understand it's on the “setting of the premium” side and not on the benefits side—that would be a parliamentary responsibility, a government decision, a minister's responsibility—there is some concern that some decisions of the board may end up impacting on the benefits side as well--either purposely or, more likely, not on purpose. So there are a number of issues.
I know that colleagues will ask you about the $2 billion reserve and whether that's sufficient, and people will ask you about the accountability side of this fund.
I want to talk about two things, first of all. One is that when we did these hearings, on very short notice a number of people made themselves available. We heard from employers, from employees, from CFIB, from the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, from the actuaries, from a number of people. So there seems to be a lot of interest in this.
I wonder whether you think, especially in light of the fact that if we had not had these hearings at this committee there would have been no public or national dialogue of any kind around the setting up of this corporation, there's room for more input from Canadians on the composition of the board and the set-up of this new crown corporation.