Thank you very much. I have to say right at the start that I think Dan is absolutely right, that it is a macro problem that we have failed to address over a number of years now. The signs were all around us. We should have known and seen it coming. Some economists warned us, but we didn't listen. The different expressions of poverty are like the canary in the coal mine. They should have told us that there was a problem and that eventually it was going to catch us all.
Now we're at that place where we have the kind of poverty that you're seeing every day. We have seen over the last few years a growing number of working poor, people who are getting up in the morning, getting out, doing the job, working full-time year-round at minimum wage, and are just not able to make ends meet as inflation continues to grow. Now we have groups of people who, because of the way the system has been set up, are deep in debt and have no savings left. The safety net has been shredded. They're going to be at your door pretty soon, too.
We have a disaster in the making here that the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says is eminently preventable. To be frank with you, I'm not quite sure how eminent it is, even with, as they suggest, a change in the EI system so that we catch more people. After 50 weeks, they run out. They've added five weeks, but they still run out. Then, when the people who run out look behind them to see what's there, there's really not much. Social welfare has been ratcheted down now so that it's just a last gasp of help for some folks.
The question is, what do we do? We're into stimulus in a big way, but stimulus to do what? Is it to recover what we had, which has just failed? Does that make much sense? I know we need to do what are often described as band-aid things. We have a charitable non-profit sector out there working full-time overtime and running out of money. We have a group out of Toronto called the Recession Relief Fund that is trying to send a message to the government to say that they're going to be broke within a matter of weeks. The sources of money of the charitable sector are drying up because the investments they made are no longer producing the income they used to produce.
Having said all that, I think we have an opportunity in front of us to change the system, if we want to, so that it works better for everybody. I'm out there trying to get some answers from people as to how we change the system so that it works better for everybody.
Dan, do you have thoughts about that? You've done an excellent analysis. Have you done any thinking about how we change it and what we can do to make it work better?