Yes, I'm glad you asked that. I didn't have much time to get into this.
There's a massive project that we've been working on for the last couple of years looking at what we've called architecture, as you said. One of the problems, when we talk about unemployment insurance, a major program of support, is that we then have welfare, and they don't connect at all, and yet these are two massive, expensive programs that are supposed to be helping Canadians who are unemployed.
As you said, our proposal would be that instead of a single unemployment insurance program like what we have now, there would be two programs. The current employment insurance program would be more of a social insurance program, because as you said, the social insurance contract between Canadians who have contributed and the government has broken down.
It is absolutely shocking that you have a major program that is now covering 43% of the unemployed. It's unbelievable. People are getting shortchanged; they are not getting their money's worth. We would have unemployment insurance—a stronger unemployment insurance. The current earnings replacement rate is 55%, which is very low; we would like to see it up to 70% or 75%. It used to be 66%, back in the 1970s. That EI program would not have a regional component, which I think is a perverse feature of the current system and very unfair in its treatment of Canadians.
The problem is that you're still going to have people who are moving in and out of the workforce or who can only find short-term or part-time work, or who only want that kind of work, and who are never really going to fit under a social insurance program like unemployment insurance. Our thinking here is to create a different kind of program that will help them, so that between the two programs we would be covering all of the unemployed Canadians.
One option for parental maternity benefits would be to move them out of employment insurance into this new program we're talking about, the temporary income program, so that people could get benefits that way. As you know, Quebec has moved into a similar kind of reform, which I think is good.
It's also possible that we could attach other so-called special benefits to this new program. The new program would not be based on premiums the way unemployment insurance is. It would just be based on general revenue, like other programs such as old age pensions.
I'll have to stop there, but we've also envisaged changes to welfare whereby this new federal temporary income program would relieve the provinces of a lot of their welfare caseload and enable the provinces to focus more on employment preparation. We have a kind of architecture that takes different pieces. But you're absolutely right.
My concern is that even if we make the entrance requirement uniform—concerning which I agree with the CCLC—and make the duration and the calculation of benefits better, we're still going to have a large number of unemployed Canadians who will simply not fit into that kind of program. That's our thinking.