Finance committee  I'll try to keep my response very concise. I would say there are a couple of points on data. Number one, it would be fantastic if we could get much better and more timely data, and disaggregated data, on how the programs that have been rolled out are working. That will allow u

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the question and also for the kind words on the little plain language guide that I put together. I'm glad that it's been of help. Thanks again to you, your constituency office, and indeed to all the constituency staff of all the members of the committee. I

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to join you today. COVID-19 has not hit all Canadians equally, whether in terms of health or economic effects. My remarks today will focus on two such forms of inequalities that I think are particularly relev

Human Resources committee  If I understand correctly, the existing program was designed as the result of bilateral negotiations between the federal government and provincial governments, because of course regulation of rent is a provincial jurisdiction. This is a little outside of my area of expertise, but

Human Resources committee  Thank you for the question. I think it's going to be clear that for people who have applied for CERB and have received four payments in a row, by June they will have exhausted the 16 weeks of the maximum entitlement. Some number of CERB recipients, we are hopeful, will have bee

Human Resources committee  Thank you for the question. The policy intent of CERB was to be to give people the economic resources to be able to stay home and to practise social distancing. Given that our employment insurance system did not have adequate coverage for all workers, and also was not able to ju

Human Resources committee  I have read the legislation myself and provided some comments to one of the first media reports that broke the story around expectant mothers. My reading of the legislation, Bill C-13 that created the CERB, is that it does not exclude expectant women. It does contain a provision

Human Resources committee  I'm not an IT expert, so I won't be able to comment, unfortunately, on the acceptability or the accuracy of a timetable for updating software. I do understand—and it's been reported in the media—that several legacy systems within the Government of Canada are mission critical in d

Human Resources committee  My understanding is that the issue is that pregnant women who are applying for the CERB through Service Canada are of course accurately declaring they are pregnant, and then finding they are being shuffled into maternity benefits. If I understood correctly from the testimony of t

Human Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to join you today. I'm Jennifer Robson, an associate professor of political management at Carleton University. To try to minimize some of the technical problems that I've been aware of in recent meetings, I