Thank you, Chair.
Welcome to both of you. I guarantee that I won't hold you up from picking up your son; that's priority number one. I wish I were home to pick my son up too.
I want to just chat a little bit about some of the initiatives in this bill, which has been brought forward by one of our more distinguished parliamentarians, who shall remain nameless throughout the committee today. As we often say about employment insurance, there are a lot of things that can be done to make the system stronger and better for more employees. I suppose you can make changes that would benefit employers as well; I think we have to bear in mind both sides. This bill refers to a number of them.
I want to reference something the Library of Parliament did for us—I think for us, or perhaps for me—back in March, in which they compared our employment insurance system to those of some other countries, particularly countries in Europe.
For example, on a waiting period, in Canada, as you know, we have a two-week waiting period. They call it a “waiting period”; it's really a “you're out of luck period” for people who are out of work. Denmark has no waiting period; Finland has seven days; France has eight days; Germany has no waiting period; and Sweden has five days. We make people wait a lot longer to get benefits than other countries do.
On benefit duration, outside of what has happened on stimulus in countries, in Canada, as you know, the benefit duration is between 14 and 45 weeks. In Denmark, it's up to four years; in Finland, it's 500 days; in France, benefits are paid for a minimum of six months; in Germany, it's from six months to a maximum of 18 months; and in Sweden, it's 300 days, but it can be extended for 150 days.
There is a whole range of areas. For example, if you look at the benefit level, we have 55% of average weekly earnings. And you're right: it used to be as high as 70% back in the seventies and probably the early eighties. Denmark has 90%; Germany has 67% if you have a child and 60% if you don't; and Sweden has 80% for the first 200 days and 70% for the period after that.
The message here is that our EI benefits... We often compare ourselves only to the United States, particularly to some states where the benefits aren't as strong; in other states they're stronger. There are a lot of ways in which you can make the case that we need to invest, particularly in times of stimulus, but even without, when you're talking about stimulus, you need to invest.
On the stimulus side, there is a lot of evidence indicating that EI is the best form of stimulus, that in fact you're giving money to people who (a) need it and (b) will spend it. The famous study that gets quoted a lot indicates that there is a benefit of $1.61 for every dollar that's spent, so I think there is a lot more that could have been done on EI.
I guess my first question is on whether your organization has any updated estimates of the cost of any of these components.