There's no question that in looking at the problems with EI—of which there are many—one of the problems has been that we haven't taken the housing framework and looked at it. The people who are less likely to qualify for EI are precisely the ones who are most likely to be in a precarious situation in terms of being able to pay their rent.
If you're working part-time because you have two children at home, or you have a child with a disability, then you have a higher percentage of your income being paid towards rent, invariably. So if you lose your job, you're most in need of a continuation of that income, at least during some sort of transition period of time. So we're going to see a major crisis of people not being eligible for EI, and then when they go on to welfare they have to exhaust virtually all their assets, put themselves into dire poverty, and then try to survive on a rate that just is not going to cover adequate housing.
There's a serious need to review EI from the standpoint of identifying the protections for income security that are most consistent with the ability to hang on to your housing. And then to supplement that, of course, we have to have emergency rental assistance programs. I was shocked at data I looked at in Ontario a few years ago showing that about half the 60,000 households who were evicted every year in Ontario were evicted for a month's rent or less.
The cost of that eviction to society and to the family and to the household is so massive, and yet we had no ability to move into those circumstances and ask what it would take for them to hang on to their housing. Most people who are homeless had housing and were evicted, so we have to really look seriously at how we prevent those evictions from happening.