I'm a research associate at Informetrica. Informetrica is an economic research firm that does forecasting. They have some data on the likely impact of the recession by gender.
I'm not qualified at all. I'm a statistician, but I'm not an economist. So I don't even want to share the results with you. You can ask them for it.
You do notice that the stimulative package and the money going into infrastructure is likely going to benefit people working in construction. At first blush, you would think most of that benefit is going to go to males, but that's not what the data suggests. As I said, the social experiment we're going into, a major recession, having substantially...“dismantled” is too strong a term, but hobbled EI and social assistance, should be very interesting.
If we find significant numbers of people ending up on social assistance in this country, we are going to be in such a bad state. In order to be eligible for social assistance, for example, in Ontario, you have to have less than $1,000 of assets. You imagine the hypothetical family—two people, one works for Nortel, one works for...pick another company—and their income goes to zero. Most of us are going to go through whatever assets we have very quickly, and then you start selling things.
You may be eligible for EI, but even with EI, if you're in an area with a low unemployment rate, the duration is not going to be 46 weeks. If you're eligible for EI, your benefits are not going to last a year. At our maximum of $450 per week, for many people, that won't pay their mortgage. We shall see. But we've certainly saved a lot of money over the last 20 years by cutting back on these programs.