Status of Women committee  Data gaps, yes, there are. As you proceed and gather data, you could certainly delve into them, but tread very carefully. It's very difficult to know exactly what you're getting when you're looking at data, so you have to ask lots of questions about exactly how it was formulated.

Status of Women committee  I take your point. You're right that I should not say that everybody who's eligible is not vulnerable and that they're all very well off and living well. I should never have suggested that. It's a matter of gradations. If you ask what proportion of the population are eligible for

Status of Women committee  It's in my speaking notes and it's also on my website.

Status of Women committee  The data exists—and I know where to get it, that's what I do for a living—on whether or not those people you mentioned are more likely to be working part time than other Canadians. I suspect the answer is yes. People working in the rural area are more likely to have a part-time j

Status of Women committee  Voluntary quits. Not only for what it did for the people who would otherwise be eligible for EI, but because of what it did to the dynamic in the employer-employee relationship. First of all, setting up a reward for, effectively, fraud: “I'm leaving. would you please lay me off?”

Status of Women committee  Of course.

Status of Women committee  There are appeal processes and—

Status of Women committee  The first answer is that certainly self-employment is an increasing share of the economy, so the exclusion of the self-employed is a problem. Then again, I'm not sure how we could cover the self-employed for regular benefits. For maternity and parental caregiving, yes, but for re

Status of Women committee  I agree totally. The most unfair example that comes to mind is university students and high school students who pay into this fund for their summer employment, who have virtually no chance of collecting EI benefits. They may pay more into EI than they pay income tax. It's one o

Status of Women committee  No, I haven't given it any thought. I don't think there would be a differential impact between men and women. I assume men are more likely to be over the maximum insurable earnings. It is surprising they're freezing the premiums at this time. I guess that means they're planning

Status of Women committee  The surplus was accumulated over years when people paid far more into the fund than they received in benefits. This is the chart that illustrates how the surplus was built up. There's a terrible temptation to say we have a better use for that fund, which is to either pay off the

Status of Women committee  There was never a bank account for the surplus that had $57 billion in it, a positive balance. It was always a paper transaction, so it's disappearing. We do have a fund that, for all those years, was collecting far more money than it needed. It was being used to keep the defici

Status of Women committee  From what I've read of that proposal, the way I read the proposal is that the contributions to a separate EI fund for the self-employed would be only for maternity and parental benefits. I think providing regular unemployment benefits to the self-employed would be fraught with pr

Status of Women committee  If you had two people who were hired, one full time, one part time, at the same hourly rate and five weeks later they were both laid off, one will have half the hours of the other, so depending on the local unemployment rate, may be ineligible. Let's assume they are both eligible

Status of Women committee  Go back to weeks. I was involved in...Kelly Lesiuk. I don't know how many of you will know the name.