First of all, don't misunderstand what I said on the Kijiji data. I think it was really dumb to use that and really bad.
What I was saying is that there is a core idea in using it that does make sense, in that this is the way that labour market vacancies are being reported there consistently. We can look at the way of adapting that core idea to be more effective. I'm not saying that Kijiji is a good way of doing it, but there is something there to learn from.
The other issue was on EI. I've written a couple of papers on the Canada job grant controversy, and the one you're referring to is the second one, which I wrote with Howard Green, and with Mike Luff from CLC. Our goal was to try to find a way to solve the incredible federal-provincial dispute over the Canada job grant, and the key seemed to be to find a way to pay for it other than taking the money out of what we saw and know to be pretty effective programs that the provinces were already offering. So we were robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it didn't seem a sensible way to increase skills. So we were hoping to be able to tap into some of the unused room in EI part II to more flexibly allow training.
I actually think, although I'm not clear on it, that some of the agreements with the provinces are doing that, or at least that's what they say they're doing. They say they're going to be using some of the funds or that the provinces will have the ability to tap some of the EI funds.
The second part of that was that you would have to increase the allocation of EI part II funds to training, so that you're not robbing Peter to pay Paul and taking more training money out. We're introducing a big, new training program called the Canada job grant and are trying to do it all from the existing pool of training money. It's inevitable that there are going to be other training programs cut. So the only way not to do that is to increase the amount.
Having said all of that—and I know that our time is short, so I feel constrained—there are real limitations to what you can do with the EI part II funds, and they are constitutional limitations. So it's quite difficult to use them flexibly. However, one of the suggestions was to go to a uniform 360 hours work contribution so that you'd expand the pool of people eligible for employment benefits under EI part II, and fiddle with the rules in that way. I think that might be possible.