And your circumstance is challenging, because people will use information to support their point of view.
The chart I distributed concerns the beneficiaries to unemployment. I think in my presentation I said there is a better way of measuring coverage. In fact, I was part of three “experts” who did some reports for the department about four years ago on how you measure coverage. Some of the numbers I presented here I used in that report, about how you measure coverage using what I think is the better measure.
That data is not readily available. In preparing for this meeting I went to Statistics Canada and spent about $100 getting readily available data in order to produce this chart. As you know, nobody is paying me to be here. In fact, because I'm self-employed, it costs me money to be here. If I had wanted to do the proper analysis, I would have spent a week and maybe $3,000, and I wasn't willing to do that.
The data exists to measure this better. I gave you some numbers in my presentation, which, if you knew it better, still don't give you 80%. I know how you get the 80%, and I'll explain it.
The value of the beneficiaries-to-unemployed ratio figure is that it's easy to get—I can get the raw data for $100—but it's not the best measure. You're right, some people in the denominator didn't pay in. If you adjust for that—and this is the paper I wrote four or five years ago for the department—it doesn't go from 45% to 80%. It goes from about 45% to 55%. But you still have extraordinarily low coverage figures for young people, women with children, people who work part time.
The way you get the 85% figure is.... Think of EI as a series of hurdles. To be eligible for your benefit, you first of all have to have had paid employment—self-employment doesn't count. You have to have a certain number of hours. You have to have left your job for the right reason—you can't be fired; it has to be a lay-off. What they're saying is, once you've satisfied this number of hurdles, how many people are excluded by the last hurdle—which is hours? That gets to 85%.
That 85% figure, which I'm very familiar with, isn't even saying that of the people who are unemployed, 80% are eligible—I don't think, though I could be wrong. I believe it is 80% of the general labour force. Usually the way that figure is used to convince people of one point of view is, of the people who are working today, if they lost their job, 85% would be eligible.
Well, most of the people who are working today aren't at risk of losing their job. If you lose your job, the more vulnerable you are the less likely you are to be eligible. Most people who are in their jobs right now have been in their job for more than a year, and most jobs are full-time. So most people out there now, if they lost their job, would be eligible. This is only relevant if everybody lost their job, which is not going to happen.
So it's a hypothetical construct designed to create a big number.
I hope that helps explain it. I am a mathematician and I'm familiar with how you can make a ratio larger or smaller, and not everybody is going to be fair.