Mr. Speaker, this is an issue that I find very interesting when we had so many people proposing this and so much buy-in from two all party standing committees in the House of Commons that the government has actually chosen not to adopt this measure.
There is a suggestion that when it comes to designing programs, to avoid the embarrassment of the EI surplus, the government had choices to make and it chose, first , not to reduce rates to the degree it could have reduced the rate. If it is going to design differences in the way EI applies, the compassionate leave and parental leave programs actually harvest more votes. It targets a group to the point where the government thinks it is more likely that it is going to get some credit for doing this as opposed to following a principle, which I think is more important, which would benefit the entire economy. I think that is the motivation behind how we got to where we are.
In terms of the current $2,000 refundable limit, the point of the yearly basic exemption is that the government never would have retained this money and so there would be no need to obtain a refund, but once people had reached the $3,000 level of annual earnings, contributions for all would be based on all of their earnings. It is not a holiday for the first $3,000 worth of earnings for those earning more than $3,000.