Human Resources Committee on Dec. 4th, 2018

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you.

Also, other testimony we heard about EI sickness benefits is that they be provided for 75 days rather than 15 weeks, to allow more flexibility for episodic disabilities. Just to give you some background, I suffered from anxiety way back in my twenties. If there had been a program that provided more flexibility for me, it would have been very helpful because, some days more than others, my anxiety was much worse and I had trouble coping.

What would you think about 75 days rather than 15 weeks, Mr. Prince?

[Prof. Michael Prince]

That would be a start toward flexibility. In 1996, when UI became EI, we moved from a weeks-worked basis to an hours-worked basis to determine eligibility. It shouldn't be an administrative nightmare or incredibly complicated to move to an hours-based form of....

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

You'd like that. You'd like that change.

[Prof. Michael Prince]

Yes, I think that would be more flexible.

[John Stapleton]

As I said earlier in my opening remarks, disabilities are not on any schedule. They don't observe time limits, and yet so much of our income security system bases itself on arbitrary time limits. Fifteen weeks is not a lot when you think of various types of workplace mishaps and other life mishaps. You need more than 15 weeks.

The bills that you have for mortgages and groceries and things like that, they don't stop during that period. If you don't have the benefits for that period, you're looking at perhaps a larger financial catastrophe that is going to cost the system more in the longer term. That's the importance of having flexible time limits.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's the time for questions, I'm afraid.

Madame Sansoucy, go ahead.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My first question goes to Mr. Prince and Mr. Stapleton.

We talked in more detail about the way to improve the employment insurance scheme, but I would like to start with a more general question. These thoughts have been occurring to me since the beginning of this study and the end of the one we conducted just before. We know that the government has not been contributing to the employment insurance fund since the beginning of the 1990s; just employers and employees do so. On the other hand, the government is under a lot of pressure to increase maternity benefits. In a previous study, we were concerned with supporting grieving parents. As you said, 15 weeks is not enough for 35% of people. In fact, 135,000 people need longer than 15 weeks and, as we know, one in every two Canadians is at risk of developing cancer, so it can only increase. We are seeing it in our study on episodic disabilities. The government has also established a program for caregivers. Those who live in a reality other than that of losing a job find it difficult to be committed to a process that is not designed for them.

The question I ask myself, and that I would like your opinion about, is this: in terms of the need to reform the employment insurance program, which I believe everyone agrees on, should we not arrange matters so that the employment insurance fund is used only for those who lose their jobs? We could use the opportunity to make the program more accessible so that, for example, 60% of the people who contribute to the fund receive benefits from it, unlike the current situation. Then, through its departments, the government could invest in parallel programs specifically designed for those on maternity leave, those who have lost children, the sick, or those with episodic disabilities. Those programs should be flexible enough to avoid those people having to line up at Service Canada with those who have recently lost their jobs. I am tending to that solution more and more. What do you think about it?

[Prof. Michael Prince]

Would you like to go first?

[John Stapleton]

First of all, I would like to provide some context for my response. When we look at income security for working-age Canadians, 18 to 65, we're spending about $60 billion overall in every sort of program. Most of our income security goes to people over 65 and to children.

I'm going to quote one figure. That figure is 12%. The other side of that, 88% of all income security, goes to people after they have worked, through the EI program. It pays you after you have worked. The CPP program pays you after you have worked. What about people who are either not working, or working in the home, or working in voluntary situations? They are part of that 12% of income that goes to people who get income security either while they are working—through the Canada workers benefit or through the EI working while on claim program—or through social assistance.

I think one of the things we have to do is start reorienting our income security system in ways that provide income security to people either while they are working, or while they are doing other things, like raising families and volunteering, when they are not in the labour force.

I think it's a laudable suggestion that we have new opportunities to do that. If you look at our income security—I try to look at it as would an intelligent Martian coming to look at it from high up—it's so oriented to the after-work experience. We need to be thinking of it while people are in their working age but unable to work and doing other things, like volunteering or raising families.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you.

[Prof. Michael Prince]

Part of your comments were around the role of the regular EI benefits and a smaller proportion of the labour force being able to access those than, say, 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Part of that is policy and administration, and part of it is the changing economy and the quality of jobs that are being created. That's a bigger project around employment strategies by federal and provincial governments, the private sector and, of course, poverty reduction strategies, federally and provincially, and how much they emphasize employment and good-quality work.

Also, when I look at recent developments with the Canada child benefit and the revamped working income tax benefit—the new Canada workers benefit—it's a recognition that there will always be jobs that are not adequate in providing a basic income for working Canadians. If they have young children, we need to help them with the Canada child benefit. If they're working and they have lower income, we help them with the Canada workers benefit. That doesn't mean government shouldn't keep trying, along with the private sector, to create good-quality jobs, but the reality is that we don't have the industrial base or the manufacturing base we did 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago. The recent events in Oshawa with General Motors are another example and reminder of that.

At the beginning of your remarks, I thought you mentioned that government used to contribute to the financing of EI—or UI at the time. Interestingly enough, when it did that, it was partly on the rationale that, if unemployment rose above 4% or 5% nationally, the Government of Canada should be on the hook to help buffer the cost that employees and employers were contributing to the fund. In other words, there should be an additional obligation on the Government of Canada to help fight to keep unemployment down. We eventually removed that. It's an interesting idea to consider whether the Government of Canada should re-enter as a partial co-funder of that program.

The special benefits that have grown in and around EI are very important programs and they provide a very important basis for providing for some of the needs of Canadians. Of course, their limitation is that you need to qualify. You need to have those insurable hours to be able to get it. That's the catch. Clearly, it's under federal jurisdiction. It's a solid and familiar program and it's a well-run program, but that's its limitation.

Until we move outside of it to basic incomes or guaranteed annual incomes, we will have it and we will need to have other programs around it, like the Canada workers benefit, the child benefit and other tax credits to help. There's no one program that we can expect to do all this.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

MP Hogg, go ahead, please.

[Gordie Hogg, South Surrey—White Rock, Lib.]

Thank you.

Listening to the testimony and the references, there seem to be a number of trigger points that are defined by way of different types of challenges. I know that Mr. Prince and Mr. Stapleton both talked about looking at more a broad-based, client-centred focus of service delivery. Societally, I think we're moving more and more toward consideration of a more generalized approach, rather than starting to define things by the 10 different categories you started off talking about, Mr. Stapleton, and various different categories that divide us up as people.

How would a system work that is client-focused, or focused around the delivery with response to a person, rather than by defining them by one of these 10 categories they fall into? Is there any example of that type of system functioning anywhere in the world? If so, where would that be? If not, if we were to look at it based on that set of principles of trying to be client-centred, how would that start to evolve, and what would be the values that we would reflect in that? What are the principles upon which it would be based?

[John Stapleton]

I'll start the reply.

First of all, I'm looking at these definitions, and I was especially struck when Deanna was talking about the CPP definition. Our income security system has come through almost 100 years of growth, and it seems that each program and definition corresponds to the era in which it was brought in. We don't have to do much historical or archeological work, because the programs are all still with us, alive and well, with the same definitions.

We went through that era, from 1940 to 1966, when our answer to every program need was to have a payroll tax: to put in a program and take money off people's pay. We stopped doing that in 1966. We moved over to tax credits in 1978, and I don't think that, since 1978, there has been any new program in the income security system that hasn't been built through the tax system.

I think one of the things we have to do is, first of all, take stock and say, okay, the first disability program in my home province of Ontario was for workers' safety and insurance—workers' compensation—in 1914, and here we are, 104 years later, and we have various payroll tax programs that have an insurance principle. The insurance principle, of course, is insuring you against the hazard of having a disability. Just as we buy fire insurance to protect us against the hazard of having a fire, we are protecting against the hazard of having a disability. Therefore, you get a definition that completely relates to the insurance principle, yet we have others through the tax system, such as the disability tax credit, that relate to our taxation system.

As we take a more comprehensive approach and look at 10 very different definitions that have evolved over the last 104 years, at least in Ontario's case, I think we need to put a stake in the ground and say, “Okay, what is the modern definition of disability?”

We know that more and more disabilities are episodic, and we know that in the future more and more disabilities are going to be episodic. Because we're an aging society and have had advances in medicine and in therapy, and because we also have many more ways of keeping people alive, through those various therapies they're able to have an episodic disability as opposed to a permanent chronic situation. Most of our definitions relate to the chronic era, when all of our disabilities were prolonged in that way.

I think if we take stock and look at what the good, relevant evidence tells us, we would start to try to move towards a common definition in all of the programs that would reflect the idea of the words we now use, which are “people with disabilities”—as opposed to “the disabled”, which is a 100%, all-encompassing definition. That is who you are: you're a disabled person. There's nothing else that you are.

Once you say “people with disabilities” or “persons with disabilities”, you start to say that you're a person first, and then you either have a chronic lifetime disability.... There is a continuum of disabilities. Rather than recognizing only a small part of that spectrum, as you've heard today from people with lived experience, we would start looking at that broad spectrum of disabilities and looking at compensating the person in that regard, as opposed to the disability itself.

[Gordie Hogg]

Using your metaphor of the intelligent Martian coming to look at things, should we be talking about disability at all, or should we be talking about accessibility? Should we turn that phraseology around to just talk about accessibility so that we're talking about how to make our society more accessible for everyone, rather than defining it within the context of a disability?

Michael, go ahead.

[Prof. Michael Prince]

No. I think we still need to use the words “disability”, “disabled”, “impairments”, “diseases” and “conditions”. I don't think we need to run away from those hard material realities. Language matters in how we phrase those. Some words hurt and some words can help.

Words like “diversability” and other words are interesting, but I think the world is still full of people with disabilities or impairments and conditions. We're all on a continuum of the different limitations and gifts that we all have. We talk about human diversity as a good idea.

[Gordie Hogg]

Deanna, if you compare us to other parts of the world, other jurisdictions, how do we fit in in terms of our access? Are there things we can learn from other countries, from other practices?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Give a very brief answer, please.

[Deanna Groetzinger]

Yes, I think there can be. Basically, I went back and looked at many papers in advance, and I was struck by the fact that this issue has been discussed by many committees, including this one, and many proposals have been put forward. One that struck me—and I can't remember, exactly, Michael; it might have been you or John—was a medium-term disability kind of program.

I'd have to actually look this up and give you some references, but I believe the Dutch have such a program. It's much more of a continuum, as opposed to these disparate programs where EI stops and there's nothing unless you have a private long-term disability insurance. If you don't have that, you're into the abyss. So yes, there are programs that look at more of a continuum for someone with a disability, and that would be something I would urge this committee to look into as well. I don't have those at my fingertips right now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

Mr. Ruimy, go ahead, please.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you all very much for being here today.

We've done two studies in a row that just tear at your heart.

As mentioned before, the EI program was not designed to handle a lot of the challenges we're having. One of you also mentioned that we need to keep the dialogue going. We need to create awareness. I think that's what we're doing. In a way, maybe, I want to try to manage those expectations. I don't think we can make this wholesale change over a three-session study. Our job is to try to hear what everybody's saying.

I want to focus on you, Patrycia and Deborah, because you come to us with lived experiences. What you both bring to the table is the courage and the fortitude to keep pushing through. Not everybody's like that.

Can you tell us about your support systems that you have in place? What is helping you to drive forward?

[Patrycia Rzechowka]

I completely understand where you're coming from. I look at it and I know there's not a simple answer. I think the answer is going to be as complicated as the disease is.

I was on EI when I went completely blind. The medication I was on made me quite sick. It wasn't even so much that I couldn't see. Actually, the reason I couldn't work was the side effects of the medication. After that, it was just sort of about trying to figure out what my body could do and whether I could go back to the job I had been doing before. At that point, I had moved back in with my parents. I had just graduated from university, so I hadn't really started on my own quite yet.

The second time my eye went blurry, I was on contract with the Government of Alberta and I didn't really have a choice. I didn't really want anyone to know, so I wore an eye patch at work because the computer screen bothered my eyes. I just continued to work and told people I scratched it at soccer or something. It was more to try to see if I could actually do that, as well, so that people might look at it after the fact and say, “You could have easily taken time off. Why didn't you?” It's that sort of feeling, like I have some sort of responsibility.

The support at work.... Every so often, I think, people forget that I have MS. Every so often, I do get that question, “How are you feeling? How are you doing?” That's really worthwhile. It's those relationships and the meaningful work that I do that kind of drive me, because I know that if I'm really, really tired, I'm going to miss a meeting or I'm going to miss a deadline. These are things that I don't want to do or I'm going to put my coworkers in a tough situation.

The times when something gets even more serious, I know that my parents are there, but I don't know if that's good enough, if you know what I mean. The burden shouldn't be on them. I've been trying to work this entire time. Even for my benefits, I have to give them a doctor's note every year to tell them that I have MS. It makes no sense. Why? I can give you a doctor's note when I don't have MS anymore. It's that total misunderstanding. I think awareness and understanding are a huge part of it.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

I think those things, like the doctor's note, are important, because those things might be easier to tackle, so to speak.

[Patrycia Rzechowka]

Yes.