I'm going to speak up on behalf of the experiences from Prince Edward Island that you brought up around the way in which we've broken up EI into a fragmented system that works differently in different jurisdictions, even though economies are changing in every jurisdiction. What we heard about the lack of consultation and the lack of understanding of local conditions was really troubling as it relates to P.E.I., where one side of the street gets EI and the other side of the street doesn't. It just doesn't make sense, especially in a community that is as fine-tuned and granular as it is in P.E.I.
In the context of the urban space, where 70% of workers don't get EI, period, no matter how much they pay into it, there is a rigidity to the way EI looks backwards to fix itself, instead of looking at real life circumstances now and looking forward to where we know the economy is going.
From my perspective, I think that the way in which the EI Commission makes those reforms has to become as nimble as the computer we want them to use, and it's not. Even though I knew we were at the point where we were about to appoint the new commissioner, life circumstances took over and we had to start again. There's nothing you can do about that when a candidate has to be removed just at the point of being selected. We had a tripartite conversation where you had a traditional employer, a traditional workforce representative and a traditional government response.
However, we just heard that there probably is a seat at the table for the new, emerging gig economy, which is way out in front of all of that. There's probably also a need for the difference between large businesses and small independent businesses, which use EI very differently. The large corporations use EI as a training mechanism. In the smaller communities, as we heard from many witnesses today, EI is a lifeline to keep small businesses alive when there are sudden and unexpected economic downturns.
I think we're locked into an historical evaluation process that doesn't work, and we haven't modernized the evaluation process so that reforms are made in real time as the funding is adjusted in real time. That lack of flexibility and nimbleness in the commission is how P.E.I. and, I would say, Toronto landed in the same space for very different reasons.
The commission needs changes. The consultation process and the diversity of consultation processes need to be made much more public, much more accountable and much more obvious to all parties involved around the table. Otherwise, we're going to repeat mistakes by using the same old evaluation system and governance system. I think that would address P.E.I. and the gig economy—freelancers and the contract work economy—which now has become so prevalent in large urban spaces.