Thank you very much for your presentations. I apologize that I wasn't able to be here. We are dealing with a state of emergency due to the high rate of suicides in a first nation in my constituency. I was just on the phone dealing with that.
Thank you for joining us here today. Obviously, our interest here is in getting to understand the situation that unemployed workers and people who would like to access EI are facing. In many cases, we are seeing that they are increasingly unable to. We have an accessibility rate of 40% right now, which, if we were in school, would be a big-time fail.
I apologize if I am referring to something that you may have already covered. One of the big issues that we want to hear more about is the need to protect the EI fund, which is paid for by workers and employers. I am wondering what your thoughts are about the importance of that so that it is there for workers when they need it.