Obviously, I shouldn't be appearing before your committee again. Honestly, I don't have an answer for you. I can never get a straight answer. Just yesterday, I was told again that they wanted to study the matter further and that they would do so gradually. Honestly, I find that as soon as a new government is elected, it changes its position. This is what I have concluded from the many steps I have taken. It is very sad, because we are really losing time. Meanwhile, every day, people are losing their homes or committing suicide. Some families are going to be impacted for the rest of their lives because they were a few weeks short.
I don't have an answer for you since no one has a really sensible answer for me. The government is just stalling by hiding behind procedures, behind the administration and behind this or that. Then something always comes up, like an election call. This is often the case. When there is an election, the bill dies on the order paper. Also, we are unlucky in the draw, as Mr. Gourde mentioned. We often get caught up in obstacles like that. With respect to Bill C‑215, it is true that it is well placed in the order of priority.
To sum up, I don't have a specific answer for you because no one has answered me satisfactorily. Yet the feasibility is there. It is now a question of will. In Canada, do we want people to treat themselves on the street? Do we want people to live on welfare and lose everything they have?
I have given over 400 interviews. I once collaborated on an article about a lady who had lost everything and was living in a campground with her 11‑year‑old boy so she could do her chemotherapy treatments. I worked on this article with the journalist Patrick Lagacé, who was outraged. There have been so many of these cases. Is this the Canada we want? Can we finally open our eyes and see that things are not going well? It's really not going well for people who are sick, people who have worked all their lives and who just want to go back to work.
We talked a lot about mental health earlier. Think of the effect this has on mental health. Do you think it helps people who are ill? People get depressed. Because of stress and many other things, people develop a host of complications that they wouldn't normally develop. Poverty sets in and children are affected and start having a lot of problems. This is what I call the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
The reasons I am given for refusing the extension of benefits are never satisfactory and never will be. Sometimes I find that they stumble over the costs. They say there is a risk of abuse, as if people decide for themselves how long they want to be off sick. Honestly, that never happens. This aspect is always supervised by a doctor. As we said, no one wants to depend on EI sickness benefits. Of course not! Getting only 55% of your salary means you are downright poor.
We need to stop using all these bad reasons. We really need to do the right thing. I can't believe I'm here again. I started this fight when I was 38 years old. I was born in 1971, the year the act was passed. Today I am 51 years old and I am still standing here. It's dreadful. I am going through this again and I am doing it for others. It's complete nonsense.
In your constituencies, you hear testimonies, but I hear these stories all the time. Over the years, a lot of times I've said to myself that I'm going to stop doing this, because nobody listens to me. I should say that people listen to me, but nothing happens. I am discouraged. I do this on a voluntary basis. I have never stopped because I have never stopped hearing the accounts of people who lose everything and end up on the street. It touches me so much that I continue. I keep going. I'm not with you today because my health doesn't allow me to, and it's really frustrating. I'm carrying on and I can't believe that I won't see this change. I can't believe that the government is just going to extend benefits for only 26 weeks. Indeed, we know—