Thank you for that question, and thank you for your opening comments.
I remember when I was chief of staff to the Premier of Nova Scotia a very long time ago, if anybody had had my picture on the wall, they would have been throwing darts at it. So this is maybe a step forward.
I will make a couple of comments, and then I am going to ask Jayne to add on.
If you step back and look at the package of federal programs, particularly the HRSDC programs, whether it is EI sickness benefits or CPP disability, etc., they were all designed for people who had a physical illness. That is what people had in mind when they were designing the programs.
Frankly, they don't work very well for mental illness. Let me just give you an illustration, and you will know this better than I do. I think it's 15 weeks. When you get to the end of 15 weeks, you lose the EI sickness benefits. Fifty per cent of the people who are still sick at the end of that fifteenth week are sick with a mental illness. In other words, half of the people who get to the end and still need help but don't have help because they have run out of sickness benefits are there with a mental illness.
The second thing is a lot of mental illness is chronic or episodic in nature. You will have a bout of depression. You will get better, you will be fine, you go back to work, and then you'll have another bout. Frequently the time between those two episodes is not long enough for you to be able to again get back into the EI program. Again, that is simply because on the EI sickness benefits, the thought that people had, logically, when they were developing it was, what to do with someone who has an illness? They are going to get better, as Mr. Savage said, and go back to work. So that's one problem that needs to be looked at.
CPP disability benefits are another thing. While technically, legally, they apply to mental illness, all of the tests you have to pass in order to get CPP disability benefits are clearly geared toward a physical ailment. You will be incapacitated for some period of time, but the incapacitation is a physical limitation, not a mental one.
In general, if you look at the programs, it would make a lot more sense to me to say, let's not keep trying to twist and tinker with a program that is designed for a physical illness; let's take mental illness out of those programs and design a single program to deal with the unique characteristics that mental illness has, which is, typically, longer to get better, sometimes episodic, and the nature of treatment is also different.
So I think the answer to your question is that I would actually favour looking at a new way, in some sense, a set of programs designed for people with a mental illness.
Now that CPP is allowed to run pilot projects, which they weren't until the last couple of years, I think you have a vehicle that would make experimentation possible. You'd have to be very careful that any changes to the programs are not street-smart. What I mean by street-smart is, I really want to know what's going to happen on the ground. I say this as a policy wonk myself. Sometimes I completely fail to anticipate how people are going to react, given a program. But with CPP you can now do experiments.
Do you want to add anything?