First, I think I said that half the money was going into the income benefits. I guess the rest is training. I don't think I know a lot about the training programs, and your observation that women use them less is new to me. But I'm no expert in that area.
I must say I am dubious about the value of those training programs, frankly, from things I've read. But my preference, if I were allowed to design this system from scratch, would be that training is paid for out of consolidated revenue using a progressive income tax system. It's not paid for out of a regressive payroll tax. Therefore, you could have a lower payroll tax to pay for income benefits, but of course I would have benefits that are somewhat more generous than these.
We are heading into a very interesting social experiment. People who have been doing research about EI and publishing studies about it for 15 years have worried about its diminished role as a cushion for vulnerable Canadians, and now we're hitting a serious economic dislocation, I gather. We will see how that impacts on EI. It's not clear to me that it's going to have a huge impact on EI, frankly, because it's quite possibly the case that if the economic downturn affects vulnerable Canadians more than secure Canadians--and arguably that will happen--then those people are generally not eligible for EI. So they will be going straight to welfare. And given the changes in the social assistance welfare regulations of the last 15 years, many of them won't be eligible because we've tightened up on those eligibilities. So I'm not sure what's going to happen to them.