I think that EI is intended primarily to concern itself with maintaining a commitment to the workforce. The difficulty, when we're dealing with very low-income workers and precarious workers, is that we don't have that regularity of commitment. For example, when COVID came along, we saw that many people simply didn't have enough hours to qualify under the standard EI definitions, and hence many of them received support through the CERB.
These workers take a number of forms. I just heard from a musicians organization in Toronto this morning that 91% of their members didn't receive EI during the pandemic, and 65% of them received at least some support through CERB. People who work in non-standard jobs simply don't fit into the kinds of restrictions that are built into the system. We've just heard about it in terms of seasonal workers.
Trying to modify the EI system in order to bring all of these non-standard workers into the fold makes it more and more difficult to meet the needs of workers in standardized jobs who need to see increases in the level of support that they receive. If they leave aside the EI program and turn to provincial income assistance, those programs are, at the same time, encumbered with a number of barriers that make it very difficult to leave that system and move into the workforce.
I think we need a system that facilitates that transition in and out of the workforce for people who, for one reason or another, are going to work that way and continue to work that way. Sometimes it's the result of—