Mr. Speaker, there was a lot in that question, so let me unpack it a bit.
First, I just made clear in my speech that in fact the $500 a week would be taxed and deducted at source. We made that decision to help Canadians as they enter the next tax payment season.
Quite frankly, the reason we have designed this new benefit system is to address a lot of the concerns the member has brought forward and we have talked about over and over again. The CRB and the sickness and caregiving benefits are modelled after the EI system.
There is a “working while on claim”-like process. People on EI will be able to access their SUB plans. We have created giving people a credit of insurable hours retroactive to March 15 for parents, for maternity, for women.
We needed to ensure the EI system could be ready to ingest the three million people we expect it to be ingesting over this week. We were not prepared to have failure as an option. It took as long as it took, and I am very proud of how hard people worked to get it ready.