Human Resources committee  What I was referring to is that perhaps the eligible recipient could draw down those 26 weeks over a two-year period in different blocks of hours, rather than saying, “You're eligible. You take it for 15 or you take it for 26 straight weeks.” Again, that may help some people with

Human Resources committee  Before we look at something like a national guaranteed annual income or basic income in our own lifetimes—and in your own terms as MPs—I think we need to look at things like the disability tax credit. The idea that we do not have right now a clause under the legislation that exe

Human Resources committee  There's some basic information put out, but it's very passive, I would say. It links directly to the disability tax credit issue as well, which is so important as a gatekeeper program, and not just for the registered disability savings program, which is a fantastic program for fi

Human Resources committee  Yes. That would be a nice long benefit.

Human Resources committee  Quite frankly, they're back-of-the-envelope calculations. It's 11 weeks times the average weekly benefit, which is a little over $400, and then an assumption of the 135,000 people who are currently exhausting the benefit at week 15, and how many of those would continue and use th

Human Resources committee  If you make other assumptions about what percentages of those 135,000 would use how many extra weeks, you can come up with different calibrations. That's why my best guesstimate is between $50 million and $100 million. That's partly based on the fact that when other programs, suc

Human Resources committee  Yes, I would say so.

Human Resources committee  That would be the low end. Yes, I would think that would be modest.

Human Resources committee  No. I think we still need to use the words “disability”, “disabled”, “impairments”, “diseases” and “conditions”. I don't think we need to run away from those hard material realities. Language matters in how we phrase those. Some words hurt and some words can help. Words like “d

Human Resources committee  Would you like to go first?

Human Resources committee  Part of your comments were around the role of the regular EI benefits and a smaller proportion of the labour force being able to access those than, say, 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Part of that is policy and administration, and part of it is the changing economy and the quality of jo

Human Resources committee  Yes, I would.

Human Resources committee  That would be a start toward flexibility. In 1996, when UI became EI, we moved from a weeks-worked basis to an hours-worked basis to determine eligibility. It shouldn't be an administrative nightmare or incredibly complicated to move to an hours-based form of....

Human Resources committee  Yes, I think that would be more flexible.

Human Resources committee  Yes. That's a pretty traditional definition of social insurance program premiums or contributions. What's interesting is that often Canadians themselves don't see them as taxes but as contributions or premiums like those to a life insurance program, but in social insurance. If I