Minister, I have a question about employment insurance. Over the last while we often have had to deal with employment insurance bills that come in front of this committee as private member's bills. There seem to be a lot of private member's bills that have been proposed and are presently on the order paper that propose to use the employment insurance fund as a solution to all sorts of problems. For example, for the problem of worker shortage, it has been proposed to use the EI fund as a way to enhance worker training. For the problem of those families with a mother, father, or family member who is ill, there's been a proposal to enhance leave benefits for the other family member.
In my view, the problem is that these bills that propose to use employment insurance as a solution leave out a whole swath of Canadians who are not eligible to participate in the employment insurance fund--many self-employed Canadians, many Canadians working on contract, often those living in the country's largest cities like Toronto, often new Canadians, often those Canadians who are in poverty. I wonder if you concur with my viewpoint on this, that the employment insurance fund is not of universal import and is not necessarily the best way to deal with some of these problems.