Absolutely. To say that our existing system is clunky and complicated is probably an understatement. Successive governments have built and rebuilt and changed and modified different components, and it has been a Herculean effort on the part of officials to keep this system going and paying Canadians every two weeks through all of this.
There are two tracks going on right now around EI. There is the immediate track to make the changes needed to pivot during COVID—the law before you is one of those examples—and to determine what comes immediately next. As was explained, on September 25 all the temporary flexibilities within the system expire and the system goes back to the way it was pre-COVID. What in that batch of temporary changes should we keep as permanent, if any? Should we extend their temporariness? What would that look like?
Then the broader conversation that this pandemic has afforded us is to really dig in and modernize EI so that it works for all workers, because we clearly learned from this pandemic that it hasn't kept up with the way Canadians work.