Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee today. I appreciate it very much.
I'm the founder of the “15 weeks is not enough” campaign. I've faced cancer three times in five years. Each time, I came up against the 15-week limit of EI sickness benefits. So I understand the purpose of your study.
During the third recurrence of cancer, I decided to launch a petition to change the Employment Insurance Act, which hadn't been amended since 1971. Since then, 13 bills have been introduced and the petition has gathered 620,000 signatures. This petition is still very active and collects many signatures every week. It has given me a better understanding of the reality out there.
Of course, we can applaud a number of measures included in the budget presented yesterday. However, I would like to share with you my failure to understand the announcement of 26 weeks of EI sickness benefits. I'll explain my point of view.
In 2019, the Parliamentary Budget Officer did a study on the possibility of increasing the number of weeks of health insurance benefits to 50. That study showed that it would be economically viable.
The study also showed that 77% of people receiving the full 15 weeks of benefits would need a minimum of 41 weeks of benefits. When you offer 26 weeks of benefits, you're helping 23% of people. That's no small thing, but why implement a measure that isn't relevant today?
The request to increase the number of weeks of benefits to 50 isn't a whim. It's a recommendation made by experts. It has also been supported from the very beginning by health organizations, the Fondation québécoise du cancer, unions, groups working to protect the rights of unemployed workers, various other organizations and society in general. Public opinion is very much in favour of this amendment. This refusal is therefore difficult to understand.
There has been a lot of debate on this issue over the past few years, and the same arguments have been repeated often. Today, I'd like to bring your attention to two elements that I consider to be very important, but that we don't often hear about.
First, keeping the number of weeks of health insurance benefits at 15 or 26 weeks is very costly, since it creates a number of other expenses. The bill is high.
Families sometimes have to rely on social assistance programs of last resort because they weren't given a few weeks or a few months of EI benefits. Unfortunately, these people often remain in poverty for the next 20 years and are unable to get out of it. This is the well-documented phenomenon known as the intergenerational transmission of poverty, which can span three to seven generations. The impact of this phenomenon is major. One person starts out in a problematic situation, and thousands of people end up in the same situation. It's a temporary situation that has permanent consequences.
In the case of an intergenerational transmission of poverty over seven generations, a total of 1,015 families could be affected. A lot of people suffer the impact of a problem that could have been addressed in the first place.
Poverty reduction strategies never talk about illness. Instead, they talk about access to housing and education, among other things. However, we never talk about illness. Yet, according to the 2016 report on the burden of socio-economic inequalities, inequalities related to health problems create an economic burden of $6.2 billion. People who come up against the 15-week EI sickness benefit limit aren't the only ones represented in this statistic, but they are part of it. This is the first thing I wanted to make you aware of. We do not talk about them often enough.
Second, there is a loss of revenue. These families, these tens of thousands of people who have to resort to social assistance unexpectedly, no longer pay taxes. They can't go back to being active citizens, whereas when you are sick, you want to get well so you can go back to work. This situation generates a huge loss of revenue for the government.
That has to be factored into the calculations. Unfortunately, every time I appear before committees, I say things that are ignored in many cases, but I think they're important. Today, I wanted to make you aware of these things so that you can think about them and that a satisfactory option can be established. It's important not to forget the people who are still the most disadvantaged and affected. The people who won't be helped are the ones who will be the sickest. That's the sad thing about the 26-week limit. The plan should be improved.
I often say that I'm very proud to live in a country—in this case Canada—where people are now allowed to die with dignity. However, I find it paradoxical and sad that we have to take care of ourselves by living in mediocrity and survive in poverty in order to do so. It makes no sense to me.
I think you know that, aside from the United States, the conditions in G7 countries are really better than here. This is also the case in most countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD. Our country is the only one that offers less than one year of benefits. I wish I could be proud to say that a program has been changed to reflect today's reality. You have an opportunity to make a difference and close these gaps.
This concludes my speech.