Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Fortunately, there is zero overlap between what I plan to say and what Ross just said, although I certainly don't have any quarrels with anything Ross just said.
I'm going to talk about another area where we've both done a lot of research, and that is on the plight of older displaced workers. We've known for 30 years or so that older displaced workers suffer enormous earnings losses when they have permanently separated from their former employer, especially when they have been there for a long tenure. They suffer very high adjustment costs. Whereas older workers tend to be insulated a lot more than younger workers in the event of layoff, once the layoff hits them, they fare very poorly on the external labour market. Currently, the public policy apparatus, and the labour market itself, often don't give them much of a second chance to be successfully reintegrated into the labour market.
Talking a bit about policy measures, I think the temporary foreign worker program should be scaled back drastically so that temporary workers are hired for temporary jobs only. There may be some situations, like harvesting and agriculture, where it's totally appropriate, but I think in many situations there's no reason why temporary foreign workers should be filling positions at Tim Horton's, for example.
I'm just starting to get into researching the area of adult learning, literacy, and essential skills, but I think that provincial governments and the federal government, which indeed are partners for that type of intervention, should be paying a lot of attention to the development of literacy and essential skills for displaced workers. We do spend a lot on job retraining—skills development, it's called. It's part of EI Part II, and the government is reforming that as we speak.
Unfortunately, the literature from all countries indicates that the retraining benefits of older displaced workers have particularly disappointing results. We might want to be reconsidering other options, other uses for the financing, for the tax dollars we're pouring into EI Part II for perhaps regional mobility grants and wage insurance, which is an alternative use of EI benefits that would be designed to cover someone if they lost a job paying $25 an hour and gained a job paying, say, $12 an hour with wage insurance. That $13 hourly differential would be partly indemnified for maybe a three- or four-year period, hopefully long enough to allow that worker to ascend, eventually, to higher earnings.
As far as EI reform goes, it really hasn't been substantially overhauled since the early 1970s. We have a one-size-fits-all model. I'm not suggesting anything new in this case. This is what the majority of economists have been saying for decades, that we should have more specialized EI benefits geared to different types of unemployed workers.
Am I running out of time?