We're here to discuss employment insurance today, but it is very challenging to ignore the tone that has been set in this response, and I say this with due respect. There has been a response from government to the economic stimulus that is required by the nation at this time, and abolishing pay equity had no place in that package. It was a non sequitur that should not have featured in this budget, and I would argue that it should never have featured as a government initiative implying that government believes that any strength comes purely from bargaining. We know that government has to be an arbiter of unequal bargaining strength and that women have fought for decades to guarantee a legislated level playing field.
But quite apart from the pay equity question is what we can do right now, outside of a legislative context, to improve access to a system that women and men and families and individuals have desperate need of. We are going to face a deluge of job losses in the next few months and the system is not prepared for this, and there is due blame to go around this room as to why the system is this way. It was both Conservative and Liberal cuts in the early 1990s that shrank access to the point where.... In the 1970s, when somebody was unemployed and the unemployment rate was 8% to 9%, the entrance requirements, if you were to convert them into hours, were 100-and-some hours. By the recession in the 1980s, it was 200-and-some hours, and now it's over 500. We know how to change it so that people can have some degree of protection.
May I just say, this is not just about justice and equity and all of those laudable things; it's about economics, because if you continue to let purchasing power go into a free fall at this point, if you just stand back and say, well, we'll do a little bit of infrastructure here and we'll do a little bit of this and that there—which is necessary—it will not be sufficient to fill the breach of what is going to be happening with the contraction of the private sector. If you look at recessions over the last seven decades, the scale of what is about to hit us requires massive offsetting momentum, and when you do things like pay equity and ignoring the changes that have happened to EI, there's no offset to the system, there's no way of preventing the free fall of purchasing power in too many households. This is not about fair mindedness; this is about preventing the recession from getting deeper and longer than it needs to be, which will bring in its sweep millions of households. I'm not overstating this.