Human Resources committee  Yes, that's exactly what I think. As for the Canada emergency response benefit and its replacement, it's really my hope that come later this year, we'll have maybe not full employment, but adequate job openings. Right now we're about 300,000 positions short of where we were in th

Human Resources committee  I suppose it's because the labour market situation will be very, very different. Hopefully, we'll be back to normal before we make any changes. I am in favour of expansion in certain areas—no overlap, no transition. When the war against the pandemic ends, we will move on to the

Human Resources committee  At a very broad level, it's a recognition that the unemployed are very heterogeneous. Someone mentioned a little while ago—and I agree totally—the system designed for full-time, mostly Caucasian, white-collar workers in the 1940s and 1950s. We have these different types of unempl

Human Resources committee  It's a more accurate indicator of shock, of something bad happening in the labour market: the reduction in employment, a drop in labour demand, the availability of jobs and the availability of job openings, vacancies.

Human Resources committee  Administratively it would be a pretty easy change for them to make. It's easier to calculate the employment rate than it is to calculate the unemployment rate for each of these administrative areas. Our point was that we want the system to be able to adjust more quickly when th

Human Resources committee  I just want to make a brief comment. I completely agree with the proposal to offer a choice between the number of hours and the number of weeks worked in the past in order to determine eligibility for employment insurance. The 1996 reform was a good one, but it was really desig

Human Resources committee  It would be somewhat minor, because the figure that is always thrown around regarding EI coverage is that 80% of the unemployed workers were covered circa 1990 and now only 40% of them are covered. Most of those people have entered the labour force, but haven't contributed to the

Human Resources committee  That's been a practice of ESDC for decades and decades now. Just about any reforms, even small ones, are tested by pilot projects only in certain EI administrative regions. That's a very sound practice, as long as a representative set of areas are chosen. Don't just take the high

Human Resources committee  I'll talk just about the passive benefits rather than the active benefits. With the passive benefits, we want to cover the idiosyncratic risk of job loss and certainly the job loss caused by recessions and cyclical unemployment. It's a system that is not too costly because we d

Human Resources committee  Was it my daughter?

Human Resources committee  You are quite right that I have changed my stance a little bit for today. The reason for our recommending in that article that it should probably be voluntary is that we think a lot of people will opt out of it. The reason I said today that we might have to make it mandatory is

Human Resources committee  Thank you very much for the compliment. I really wasn't expecting that.

Human Resources committee  Just the outcome for the labour market is very different, so we have a big drop in demand. During the last session they were talking a lot about the big drop in demand, but we also have a drop in supply with businesses being totally closed or businesses being partially open but w

Human Resources committee  I'm in favour of doing away with the one-size-fits-all administrative apparatus and creating a number of more specialized programs. By the way, I really sympathize with what Ms. Brown was saying about part-time workers. Part-time workers are not treated nearly as well as part-y

Human Resources committee  Yes, okay. My fear is, though, we would likely see the provision of insurance altering the employment and unemployment outcomes. That would likely encourage a higher level of separation, sometimes in the form of quits, other times in the form of layoffs, higher than the counterf