Human Resources committee  There are just too many people who are falling into the cracks here. The majority of the people who were unemployed during this recession weren't able to get EI. They weren't able to qualify for it. We can't leave those people without some attention. We need to get them back into

Human Resources committee  Picking up on that, first of all, I think we have to get this on the radar screen. One of the difficulties is that we go into election campaigns and poverty, housing, and homelessness never seem to make it onto the table for discussion. These are important issues, particularly fo

Human Resources committee  On that particular one you mentioned a moment ago, the EI sickness benefits, there are people who have cancer who get cut off at 15 weeks. That hasn't been reviewed since 1971, and it doesn't speak to some of the needs of people who are on EI sickness. So we've recommended that o

Human Resources committee  I think we also need to bear in mind that there are support services that people need. It's not just all about money. That's a big part of it, but there are support services. I particularly think of the disabled, but of some of the others—the education, those who are employable b

Human Resources committee  No. We're already putting in a ton of money. We need to switch the direction of the ship. You can't do that overnight; you have to do it slowly. You're going to have to take some money and move it, and shift things to get the ship turned around. But right off the bat there are so

Human Resources committee  It can take some time. That's why we didn't have just the big bang kind of recommendation here. You could say the guaranteed income might be the big bang, and maybe that can work, but we've got a lot of other incremental options, and some of those are short term, that can start t

Human Resources committee  We have some studies in here. I mentioned the group of economists—Judith Maxwell, Don Drummond, and others—who put together some costing on poverty. There's no doubt that the budgetary officer could do more. In fact, at one point in time, we talked about engaging him to help us d

Human Resources committee  There is one recommendation that deals with literacy programs. I referred to adult literacy as being quite important. It's recommendation number 22: The Committee recommends that the federal government sustain strong financial support for adult and family literacy programs, wi

Human Resources committee  I'm very pleased that you mention Michael Kirby, because he was my predecessor as chair of this committee, and it was this committee—I was very pleased to be a member of it, although briefly at the time—that produced the Out of the Shadows at Last report. One of its recommendatio

Human Resources committee  We did look at all sorts of different possibilities. When you come up with 74 recommendations, you're covering a lot of territory. We may not have covered it all exactly the way you might have mentioned, but overall these recommendations will have the effect of lifting people out

Human Resources committee  If I could just briefly respond, we're not talking about a prescriptive federal strategy, but the federal government has money in housing. It has an agency with a lot of expertise: CMHC. It has a strategy now that deals with homelessness. What we're saying here is, it needs to be

Human Resources committee  No, I think it would have been another year or two before we got to that. Obviously each recommendation has to be taken and costed. What we want to have here is a change in the paradigm, a change in how we look at this. Let's look at it through the lens that if we invest this mon

Human Resources committee  We have a little bit of a different perspective on that, but I won't go there. Let me say, however, that this comes from a subcommittee on cities. We started at the local level in our examination of this. We feel a lot of the answers are at the local level--through the provinces

Human Resources committee  We didn't say it necessarily had to be the EI account in every case. For example, in recommendation 7 we said: The Committee recommends that the federal government develop a new program to insure against income losses due to long-term employment interruption that covers those w

Human Resources committee  Recommendation 10, for example, says to “...re-engineer the Employment Insurance program to allow adjustments to anticipated economic downturns, rather than be based solely on recent but past experience.” That speaks to the regional context such that in some areas you don't quali