Thank you very much. I appreciate the recognition for the staff and the officials who really are working very hard to make sure we get these programs out the door quickly, that we get the benefits to the people who need them as quickly as possible.
There has been a lot of talk about provincial disparity. As I mentioned earlier, we don't look at EI that way. What we do is on a regional basis. Until very, very recently, for example, Vancouver had about a 3% to 4% unemployment rate, whereas parts of northern British Columbia had a very high rate. They'd had different accessibility and different terms of benefits for EI.
Ontario's rates vary as well. In the last three months, 11 Ontario regions have experienced increases in their unemployment rate, and that has resulted in lower accessibility standards. In other words, they could get at it easier and have longer benefits.
One of the interesting things about Ontario is also that it has a much higher percentage of self-employed people, which is a great spirit of entrepreneurism. One of the challenges with that, though, and it's a risk of being self-employed--I've been there myself--is that you don't pay EI, and EI is, by definition, insurance. It's like house insurance. If you don't pay the premiums, you can't collect the benefits.
That being said, in this economic action plan, we are including opportunities for people who are self-employed to get the benefits that one would normally get under the part 2 portion of EI, which is training for a new position, getting skills that will help them transfer into another job in another sector where they could have jobs for a very long time. I think that's a very special part of this, and it's one of the reasons I'd like to see this budget pass quickly, so that we can have the authorization to go ahead and get these expansion programs out to the people who really need them.