You need to reduce the hours that trigger the entrance, make it uniform across the country, and let people in, even if it's only for two years as you've expanded the five weeks at the back end. Even if it's just for two years, do it now. Do it as fast as you can. Forget about the budget being passed. Start a whole other bill and start right now, because we don't have time to wait.
When you look at the statistics on how quickly unemployment jumps on top of a GDP decline, and when you look at the history of the last two or three recessions, this is coming at us like a freight train. We know what is about to happen and we are not prepared for the economic free fall.
Please work together to open up access. If that's all you do, it is something. In addition to that, a lot of people will not be able to survive on 55% of minimum wages of a part-time job. So expanding income support like the refundable GST tax credit is a remarkable way of making sure purchasing power goes to the people who spend all of it.
The IMF has said, if you are going to do economic stimulus in the form of income supports, any kind of tax reforms, any kind of new incomes, give it to the people at the bottom. Why? They spend it all. We have, starting in January 2009, a brand-new tax reform, the tax-free savings account. The benefits are going to accrue to people who are saving. Ladies, we have a crisis. We need people to spend, not save. Though it is prudent to save if you can, taxpayers should not be subsidizing the people who can afford to save at this moment, when we desperately need more purchasing power, more aggregate demand. It is an inappropriate way of distributing the scarce resources that we have at our disposal. That same amount of money devoted to increasing the incomes of people at the bottom means you get more purchasing power and in the local economy.
So there are lots of things that can be done, that can be done very quickly, but if you do not move with haste and with certitude that this is something that is going to actually support and stimulate the economy, we are going to be prolonging and deepening this recession far more than we need to. It's utterly preventable. That's the crazy part about this moment.