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.