Madam Speaker, I thank the member for raising this long-standing problem with the employment insurance system. We can debate the reasons and virtues of this, but more and more people in the Canadian workforce, and in the global workforce more generally, are not working the kind of nine-to-five jobs of the past, and we do not have an employment insurance system that recognizes that.
Earlier, a Conservative colleague of hers was quick to try to shoot down one of the big solutions that has been put on the table, based on some misleading claims about how a guaranteed annual income might be funded and how it might be rolled out. One of the ways that people are talking about addressing this issue is moving toward some kind of guaranteed annual income system.
This would do a lot for many marginalized people, including people living with disabilities and seniors who have inadequate pension income, but it would also do a lot for Canadians who are participating, whenever they can, in a workforce that does not provide a lot of steady employment in the way that we are used to thinking of it, which is a nine-to-five, 40-hour-a-week job. That would help them take more risks. We have heard from advocates of guaranteed annual income some of the benefits to entrepreneurialism that exist when people know that, within a certain limit, they can try and fail without losing their shirt.
That is one of the directions we need to be looking in quite seriously as we move into the future, to make sure that we have an income support program that can capture everyone, so we are not continually having the kinds of debates that we have been having throughout the pandemic. These are the debates about all the different people who are falling through the cracks and who really do need that assistance, and about how we would all be better off if they got that assistance because they are going to spend that money in the local economy. That is the direction we need to be looking.