Finance committee  That's a lot. I have just a couple of points. One comes from my colleague, Professor Lee. Pension reform goes in waves. About every 10 years there is a push for pension reform, and then something moderate is usually done. One of the proposals we made some years ago was for a s

Finance committee  First and foremost, index the system. Otherwise you're going to be losing ground all the time. What we would like to see is that the child benefit—the new child benefit is an extremely powerful instrument—be increased over time, invested in over time. Not everything can be solved

Finance committee  Yes, sure.

Finance committee  The new program we mentioned in our report wouldn't be universal; it would be income-tested. The mechanism we're using now for more and more social programs is income testing. I'd have to think more about a universal program.

Finance committee  There are two key criticisms that we make about EI. I think EI is an incredibly important part of our social security system and certainly is one of the social programs that is most in need of reform. We think the regionalization aspect of EI is a bad idea. It leads to the kinds

Finance committee  Yes. Thank you for your comments. It's nice to hear that people read our work, and that we are non-partisan. Let me just give a specific example to answer your question. But first, the failure to index the new child benefit blew me away. I never could have thought that a new gov

Finance committee  No. The government has said that in 2020 they will begin indexing it, yes.

Finance committee  That was part of the mystery of the whole thing. On budget night, a reporter, from I can't remember which newspaper reported that it was not going to be indexed until 2020. I talked about that with my colleague Sherri Torjman, and we couldn't believe that this could be true. We c

Finance committee  Thank you. One of the most important and thorny policy issues I have had to face in my long career is indexation, whether full or partial. In 1998 I wrote a report called “No Taxation Without Indexation”. It explored the impact of partial de-indexation of the personal income ta

Human Resources committee  If we go right back to the beginning of our discussion, Andrew was talking about how poverty among female-headed single-parent families has been almost halved over the last 10 years or so. Part of the explanation is improvements in child benefits; the other part is the increasing

Human Resources committee  The same.

Human Resources committee  Basically, we had one program, the Canada child tax benefit. It took about 30 years to finally get one rational, sensible program that worked. The current government came in and brought back a version of the old family allowances, which became the $100-a-month universal child car

Human Resources committee  Sorry, I guess I left it back.... I just wanted to give you a price tag of one of our major proposals. Our proposal is that the Canada child tax benefit be increased. It's around $3,400 to $3,500 now per child, maximum. We propose that it go up to $5,000. Our proposal would take

Human Resources committee  Over what we're spending now.

Human Resources committee  Yes.