Status of Women committee  We would agree with you that EI should be going to people who have contributed. The system is predicated on that. The problem here is that we need to take a broad brush approach to a whole set of laws, including labour standards, the Canada Labour Code, etc., and start to drill d

Status of Women committee  In the situation I'm talking about, it would be to have them rolled into the program, to be deemed dependent contractors and rolled into the program with employers and employees contributing.

Status of Women committee  If I understand you correctly, you might be speaking about the final point I was making in my comments at the outset. This has been a continuing problem. If someone is on parental leave and then later on needs to go on regular benefits, in this case because of a summer lay-off, t

Status of Women committee  Absolutely not.

Status of Women committee  It has not taken it into account.

Status of Women committee  We attended a presentation a few weeks ago sponsored by the EI commissioner for workers, where there were a number of government staff there who deal with EI. One of the things they noted is that they see some troubling signs on the horizon for them from some of the most recent n

Status of Women committee  Thank you, and thank you for the invitation. I'm going to focus on employment insurance, which along with CPP is one of our two most critical social insurance programs in the country. It is important for women to move into non-traditional jobs in the labour market and to take on

Finance committee  I'll have a separate conversation.

Finance committee  Okay. What I'll do is simply repeat that we need a reform of the hours system. It's certainly not a magic bullet, but we need to start there. The whole system is premised on a 35-hour week, both for access and duration of benefits. For us that would be the key place to start. Th

Finance committee  First of all, our organizations are advocacy groups for paid employees. We would not be necessarily looking at issues of ownership and so on. We do look—especially in a city like Toronto and in some of the other large urban centres—at what happens to people off-reserve who end u

Finance committee  Quite simply, this has been a long-standing demand on the part of many players here. I think all the stakeholders have had an interest in it. We had a brief semi-experiment with that for a few years, and it was ditched. I think we need to get back to that.

Finance committee  I think the assumption here is that we're going to have to work with the premiums that are available. Again, we have advocated that there should be a government contribution as a tripartite contributory fund. In the past, that is exactly what happened, up until about 1990. When t

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  An independent financial body responsible for administering—

Finance committee  As for the stakeholders, the government should participate in it, but business and labour, which contribute, would be the other stakeholders.