I've organized my comments around recent statements from Minister Mihychuk and from a statement made by honourable members of Parliament Ms. Trudel and Ms. Ashton on behalf of the New Democratic Party.
First of all, I have long been in favour of abolishing the NERE requirement, and it doesn't seem as though there's much argument about that anymore. It would be a lot easier to analyze the impact of the NEREs and to try to track their behaviour and their outcomes in the labour market had the survey of labour income dynamics not been abolished. The survey of labour income dynamics of Statistics Canada was discontinued because of very severe budget cuts at Statistics Canada. They have made it harder to deal with some of these pressing issues, such as temporary foreign workers and employment insurance reform.
As for those workers who might accept or might have to accept a lower-paying job after they've been displaced, a number of years ago I did a study for what is now Employment and Social Development Canada concerning wage insurance, which would be a different use of the employment insurance fund whereby someone could accept—hopefully temporarily—a lower-paying job and be indemnified for part of their wage loss, rather than be totally indemnified for their employment loss for only a limited number of weeks at 100%. It's basically insurance on a sliding scale for your lost earnings. I would be quite enthusiastic about a pilot project to try that out.
The minister mentioned a parental benefits system. I think economists have long thought that parental benefits and maternity, paternity, and adoption benefits should be totally removed from the EI system. They're only there for administrative convenience. There's a totally different story going on. I think they should be placed in a separate funding envelope in a different system.
I was very glad to hear Ms. Donnelly talk enthusiastically about the labour market development agreements and passive benefits—retraining, labour market information, job counselling, etc.—but we still have to acknowledge that we don't know an awful lot about which of these interventions work and are really helping workers and which ones don't work. That's true for other countries as well. I'm all for expanding funding for EI part II, but we still need to do a lot of research and run experiments to figure out how to get the biggest bang for the buck in helping unemployed workers in Canada.
The minister also mentioned the work-sharing provision. This is something I researched quite a bit in the past. The program has been totally dormant for years now, but I fear that the downturn in oil prices and commodity prices is far too long for the wage-sharing provision to really apply.
The minister also talked about a desire to keep payroll taxes low. I'm all in favour of that as well, because they impinge upon the demand for workers. This shouldn't just be aimed at small employers. I think we really shouldn't, particularly for payroll taxes, differentiate according to the size of employers.
I'll move on to the proposal by the New Democratic Party for uniform entry requirements. Ms. Donnelly was talking about that. I am all in favour of this. Certainly today we would never reach agreement about what that threshold should be, but I'm definitely in favour of uniform entry requirements. Yet I also think they should be coupled with uniform benefit entitlement periods.
We should make it easily accessible for everyone across the country. Under normal conditions the benefit period should be the same for everyone as well, with the exception of what they do in the United States. In the United States they lengthen the benefit entitlement period or duration during recessions like 2008 and 2009. Even the United States, generally very stingy when it comes to unemployment insurance, greatly extended the benefits when there was a terrible, negative shock to the entire labour market. I think we can have extended benefits in those situations. Ms. Donnelly was absolutely correct. I think we're just about the only country on this planet that has these variable entry requirements and extended benefits on a regional basis.
We should lower entry requirements, yes. I'm all in favour of that. Exactly what the number is, I wouldn't dare answer that without much more research. That will cast the net a bit wider as far as access is concerned.
A point that was raised during the last session is that we certainly do not want to encourage, subsidize, or develop further seasonal or frequent use of the system. I would want to see safeguards so that we don't take new entrants into the Canadian labour force and have these new entrants or re-entrants develop dependency patterns on the EI regime.