Human Resources committee  In my opinion, no, we can't. I think that one of the characteristics of the existing system is its incredible complexity. Every time we try to solve an additional problem, we layer another layer of complexity on top of it. I think one of the benefits of basic income is that it

Human Resources committee  That's right. That's exactly the case.

Human Resources committee  I think employment insurance plays its role. I think it is a smaller role than we try to make it play, and I think that going forward it's going to be difficult to transform it in such a way that it can meet all of the needs that people try to ask it to meet. How do we pay for

Human Resources committee  [Technical difficulty—Editor] a single benefit would make things much simpler and much more just. It would actually ensure that people receive the benefits they're entitled to receive.

Human Resources committee  Yes, I did.

Human Resources committee  I think so. I think that one of the difficulties of a provincial program is that provinces simply don't have the capacity that the federal government does to make changes to the tax system and so on. It was being piloted, but it was being piloted as an experiment within an existi

Human Resources committee  Yes, exactly.

Human Resources committee  Right, and I think there is an opportunity to do that and to also recognize that the provinces have different social realities and different economic realities. It's certainly possible to imagine that basic income might take a slightly different flavour depending on where in the

Human Resources committee  EI can work extremely well for some people, and as long as it works as a social insurance system there's no reason to talk about replacing it. We can transform that system to make it work for the people for whom it works. I think that a basic income captures those people who si

Human Resources committee  In terms of the funding, I think we've seen two reports from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, one of which was conducted in 2018 during a normal year with normal levels of unemployment. The net cost of the program, rolling into it a number of other cash support payments from the

Human Resources committee  I think that EI is intended primarily to concern itself with maintaining a commitment to the workforce. The difficulty, when we're dealing with very low-income workers and precarious workers, is that we don't have that regularity of commitment. For example, when COVID came along,

Human Resources committee  Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. Changes in the global economy over the past 40 years, and most recently the financial shocks of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic, have undermined a lot of the institutions that Canadians rely on to keep the world a reasonably just p

Finance committee  I can send that.

Finance committee  The difficulty with doing it on a provincial basis is that there is a big difference between provinces in this country. If you're talking about Ontario and Quebec, you can possibly talk about this provincially. If you're talking about P.E.I. and Manitoba, the story changes a litt

Finance committee  You've asked some hard questions. Yes, absolutely, a number of people...there are a lot of different models of a GAI out there. Most people who are seriously talking about this in Canada right now are talking about a negative income tax model or a refundable tax credit. In ter