I can pick up on part of what you said, Tony.
You've heard from all of us that there's been progress for seniors and there's been progress for kids. The area where we've made no progress--in fact it's gone backwards--is for working-age adults. This gets us back to employment insurance, which is, both in a political sense and in a policy sense, a dog's breakfast. It's incredibly difficult to reform employment insurance, as we've found through experience. Yet, to me, one of the absolutely crucial parts of any kind of poverty reduction strategy is income support for the unemployed. This is one of the basic fundamentals of a modern social security system. As you just said, it's so far from universal, it's hard to believe.
The shrinkage in coverage of employment insurance is the most extraordinarily negative event in the modern history of Canadian social policy. I mean, if you think of it in terms of a social insurance contract between working Canadians and their federal government, everybody pays for this program, everybody who's an employed person—it doesn't cover the self-employed, of course—and a small percentage of them, when they need the program, get the program. It's not only income benefits; it's also the related training and employment development services that are connected with eligibility for EI.
It's a controversial program. It's very, very difficult politically for any government of the day to make rational changes to that program, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an horrifically inequitable program. The variable entrance requirement that I mentioned means that employment insurance is like a three-dimensional chess game. Whether you get benefits and the amount of benefits that you get and how long you get them for depends on which of the 58 regional unemployment regions you live in. You can have two people who are unemployed, who had the same earnings pattern before they fell unemployed, and one of them could end up with a maximum benefit and the other could not even receive benefits. They're two unemployed Canadians and our federal program is treating them differently depending on the unemployment region where they live.
I just find that unbelievable. Between that and the fact that whether you get EI or not is a long shot, it seems to me that's the weakest link federally in our poverty reduction strategy.
Now, we've made some proposals, as I said, and I agree with what Andrew said about the need to bolster that program as part of the fiscal stimulus. The Americans are doing that. A traditional role of employment insurance during a recession is to be counter-cyclical. But even when the economy improves, which it will, that program will still be inadequate. It's still going to miss a huge chunk of Canadians whose work patterns will disqualify them from employment insurance. That's what has driven us to start to think in more architectural terms that maybe employment insurance will never be adequate to the modern labour market; maybe we do have to add a second kind of a program, an income-tested program, which would provide unemployment benefits to people who simply will never fit into a social insurance program.
We've also connected the work we're doing to the reform of welfare. Welfare is another terrible, archaic program that is not working. I know it's not a federal program, but you can't talk about poverty reduction in Canada without talking about one of the main programs that keeps people poor, which is welfare.
I'm saying all of that not to be grim about it all, but just to say that there is a huge challenge in front of us and we have to take that challenge on. Employment insurance simply cannot go on the way it is now. It's a program that doesn't work.
