Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you, everybody.
Mr. and Mrs. Cormier, thank you for being here and for your story.
I experienced what you experienced as a sibling and as a child. When I came into the world, my parents had already lost one infant in 1969. I was born in 1970. I saw my dad cry for the first time in 1975 when we lost my sister, Lisa, and then Gilles didn't come home from the hospital. He was hydrocephalic. He was missing a ventricle in his heart and died 10 days after he was born. That's when I started my battle with faith and God, because how do you take a 10-day-old baby away? Then we lost my sister at 20 years old.
I don't know how a marriage survives after losing four kids, but they did it. The government wasn't there. Nobody was there. We had family. We had faith. We had friends. I remember days and weeks of food just arriving, because nobody was cooking. You don't know what day of the week it is. You don't even want to get up.
This was as a sibling. When I took my sister's books back to MacEwan and they asked me why I wanted to take the books back, I just looked at them with steely eyes and said, “Death.” I wasn't Mr. Nice Guy. I was still grieving over the loss of my sister.
We don't need a piece of legislation to go to see Minister Duclos today and tell him that his people in Service Canada need better training. You don't talk about a human being ceasing to exist and so your benefits cease to exist. That's just wrong. We can do that today.
You are here, and you're very brave. I want to thank you both. My condolences to you for your loss.
Mr. Richards, thanks for putting this on our radar screen. I know you've been in politics a lot longer than I have. Is employment insurance the best place for this idea? I'm not sure that it captures the full Venn diagram of who you're intending to catch and who I would want to catch, as an uncle.
You don't have to agree politically with the CCB, but it's clean. If you're on the tax rolls, you get the benefit. I wonder if this is a similar thing, so that if you're a parent and you have a child and that child passes away, the death certificate at Service Canada is all you need. It doesn't go through the EI system. It's automatic that if your child dies, and they're 18 or younger—because they would qualify for the benefits otherwise—those benefits should go to you for the 12 weeks that the guests are proposing.
You could do it out of the maternal/paternal benefits for the first zero to 12 months, but that won't cover everybody from one to 17. Maybe there is a CCB parallel here that's just a child bereavement benefit program. We could run it through finance and run it through the tax rolls, because people won't qualify through EI. There are two million claims. People are going to get lost in the shuffle. Quite frankly, they're not going to fight to the same degree that somebody's going to fight for in the case of the weekly benefits, because they don't have their full wits about them.
I know how difficult it is to get to where you are with your piece of legislation. I'm not suggesting that you're going to change the whole world about this. Would you be prepared to look at whether there was a cleaner way to get the benefits to the people who were asking for them? I'd be happy to go talk to Minister Morneau and his team to say that this seems to me to be a cleaner way to get to this end state.