Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Madam Minister, I want to thank you for being here today. I also thank the officials who have provided us with information up to this point. I must say that we have learned some things, but we still need more information. Perhaps we will get it today.
According to the figures that we were given, Bill C-50 will benefit 190,000 unemployed people, to the tune of $735 million. When we ask questions about this, we get explanations about the way in which these results were obtained. Mr. Beauséjour and Mr. Thompson, among others, told us that it was possible to determine the number of persons who are coming close to exhausting their benefits: 30%. Of that percentage, 21% would be eligible. We already know that much. However, to get such accurate results, it seems to us that you must have a certain amount of data by region and by sector.
For the past three weeks, we have asked you what method you used and the results you obtained. We asked the senior officials about this two or three weeks ago. I asked them those questions, as did my colleagues from the House of Commons. We repeated the request two days ago and we still do not have the information. I am repeating the same request today.
Madam Minister, we have before us a disqualification bill. For some years, more specifically for a few months, there has been a consensus to invite the government to make easier rules for accessing employment insurance. You must have spent the entire summer working on the 360-hour issue. But this bill still excludes as many people as it can. Right from the start, 70% of unemployed people who make contributions are excluded, as well as the people whom you exclude with your ratio. Now add the groups that my colleague mentioned earlier and that are especially vulnerable: all the workers in a precarious position, particularly women and young people, workers who collected employment insurance during the last five, six or seven years, workers in the forestry, in the fishery and in tourism. The exclusions are beginning to add up.
You said that you had targeted certain groups of clients. Who are in these groups? We still do not know, unless we make inferences from what you told us. You said that you had considered the number of unemployed people who had been laid off since January, and as you noticed that there were a lot of them, you tried to target them. To do this, you established criteria such as the number of years and the premiums.
Could you tell us why you excluded so many people, what groups of workers you targeted and which regions they live in?