Anybody who gets a paycheque in Canada has looked at the top and bottom lines once or twice, comparing the money they earn to the money they get to keep after the government is done with them. After a while, they stop looking, because it’s just too painful. It’s a shame: if Canadians kept looking at their cheque stubs, they would soon demand an end to Canada’s rotten-to-the-core Employment Insurance (EI) program.
The Harper government promised an overhaul to the EI program in the budget and followed through recently with a set of changes designed to crack-down on pogey addicts who make a game of playing the system.
The new rules divide Canadians into those of us who work a lot and collect EI very little (less than 35 weeks in the past five years) and those of us who milk EI like a Holstein, filing EI claims at least three times in the past five years, or sitting on pogey at least 60 weeks in the past five years. There’s a separate set of rules for everybody else.
After seven weeks on EI, frequent claimants, Canada’s pogey Ph.D.’s will now be expected to work for just 70 per cent of their previous wages, in any job they can perform, or face having benefits cut off. Those of us who haven’t made a career of harvesting EI benefits will be able to collect for 18 weeks, while searching for a job, in our usual occupation, at the wages we’re accustomed to earning.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has supported these reforms as a step in the right direction. And so, some have suggested we, and the government, are attacking everyone in Atlantic Canada.
While that’s not true, there is some truth to EI being divided by region. Take Toronto for example where only 26 per cent of the city’s working population even qualifies for EI benefits. Living in Toronto you need to work a long time to qualify for benefits and you collect them for a very short time.
Meanwhile in Prince Edward Island, where you can work as little as 12 weeks and collect EI for 37, 78 per cent of EI claimants have collected
at least three times in the past five years. It’s no surprise then, that the federal government granted permits in January to hire 60 temporary foreign fish plant workers, on the Island, even though 294 PEI fish plant workers filed EI claims that same month.
Self-styled defenders of the working class, (or the non-working class, as the case may be), should explain to the 74 per cent of Toronto’s workforce who don’t qualify for EI – people pulling night shifts at Tim Horton’s – why over four per cent of their paycheque is being sent to people living in an Island paradise, not to work.
There’s no means test for EI and no asset test: a couple of lucrative crab catches for a Maritime fisherman will cover a year’s worth of EI premiums, good to fund 37 weeks of EI benefits. It doesn’t matter if you own a boat, a couple of cars, a house and an acreage. All the better to enjoy the $2,015.06 taken this year from every Canadian and their employer (every Canadian earning at least $45,900 a year) to fund this massive transfer scheme that sometimes plays the role of Robin Hood in reverse.
There’s a better way. Rather than forcing working Canadian taxpayers to ship $2,015.06 to another end of the country, to fund yet another round of pogey for some stranger, why not let them keep the money in a tax-sheltered rainy day fund – a real unemployment insurance fund. You could have an account in your own name, not unlike your Canada Pension Plan account, and dip into it whenever you need it. After 30 years, if you never used it, with interest, there would be over $100,000 sitting there – you could use it for your own retirement. Or you could use it (after all, it’s your money) if you or your spouse lost your job.
Of course, once the money’s gone, it’s gone, so you would probably be a bit more willing to take a job in, say a fish factory, especially if you’re a fish factory worker.
And that’s the point. Not only would this real employment insurance program save us hundreds of millions in enforcement, administration and looking over the shoulder of pogey addicts, it would leave $20 billion each year in the hands of working Canadians who really deserve the money, and stop paying people not to work.
Gregory Thomas, Federal and Ontario Director
