Thank you for the question.
It's an important point. I can give you a very simple example related to COVID-19. My youngest son is 22 years old. He's a firefighter and is in excellent shape. He contracted COVID-19 last December, and he was the first to admit he was surprised he was so sick. It took many weeks, even a few months, for him to recover, and we're talking about a young person in great shape.
We are starting to see cases of young people—and not so young people—who are already past the six-month period for the effects of COVID-19 and are still not able to return to work.
By setting the number of weeks of benefits at 26, are we once again telling all the people who are going to join those who have run out of benefits and are not returning to work—they currently make up 77% of those people—that they too will be forced to go on welfare? That percentage will go up and the reciprocal percentage, 23%, will go down.
We must not overlook all the impacts associated with this illness or the many years they will be part of a system that does nothing for them. As Mr. Céré said, we are sailing in uncharted waters on this, but we can already start taking a step back. We can see that there are impacts, and that young people and people of all ages are being affected, including very active ones. Do we want to push these individuals into poverty?
In addition, I have often heard the government say that no one will be left behind and that they will help all Canadians. What about the sick people who went through their 15 weeks of benefits and fell through the cracks? They had no CERB, no other benefits. That is terrible. We need to think about that.
For all these reasons, the benefit needs to be changed to reflect today's reality. Why put in place a benefit that's inadequate and that will immediately lead to more claims? Let's get it right and make sure we include those who will experience the effects of COVID-19.
This will also stop us continuously implementing temporary measures. Otherwise, we're going to have to develop more of them. So this would allow us to introduce a measure that would more in tune with the times.