We need EI reform to end the shameful damage it has caused in many communities, particularly throughout eastern Quebec and Atlantic Canada. Check out my latest Ottawa Citizen column on this topic below:
EI has caused shameful damage down east
By Brian Lee Crowley, Ottawa Citizen, May 19, 2012
Critics of the federal government’s plan to press workers on employment insurance (EI) to accept available work remind me of Captain Renault walking into Rick’s Nightclub in the film Casablanca. They are shocked — shocked, mind you — to discover that there is gambling going on in this establishment.
Renault knew perfectly well what was going on in Rick’s; he was a regular there himself. But it became a convenient excuse when he needed to close the place down.
Where EI is concerned, the critics are shocked at the suggestion we might need EI reform because after all, highly qualified engineers shouldn’t be forced to sling fries at minimum wage. True. But it is also a herring of the deepest red hue. We need EI reform to end the shameful damage it has caused in many communities, particularly throughout eastern Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
Having lived in that region for 20 years, I saw the damage close up. This is what it looks like on the ground: A friend of mine moved from B.C. to Lunenburg and got a job in a restaurant. She was stunned to learn the restaurant closed outside the tourist season. The owner said it wasn’t because she didn’t want to stay open, but she couldn’t get people to work in the winter once everyone was “stamped up” (i.e. qualified for the maximum annual EI benefits). My friend said she was willing to work all year long. Once word of this got out, she got calls from employers all over town fighting to hire someone willing to work over the winter.
One year in Petit-Rocher, New Brunswick, the fish plant closed for lack of fish; the locals demanded a provincial make-work project until they could get fully stamped up. When the fish plant in the next town offered them work, and a free shuttle bus service to get there, the workers angrily refused — until the province told them if there was work available there would be no make-work.
The Ocean Choice fish plant in Souris, PEI, has to bring in temporary workers from as far away as Russia and Ukraine in a province with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney finds this inexplicable. Look no further than EI for that explanation.
My wife and I owned a restaurant in Halifax and had firsthand experience of the system. People would leave us résumés and then be genuinely puzzled when we phoned to offer them work. We apparently hadn’t understood the blindingly obvious: those résumés were strictly for the benefit of the EI administrators. Don’t try to blow the whistle on these cheats to EI, though; the people who administer it in Atlantic Canada long ago became complicit in the plundering of the system. The claimant is king and the local politicians who have fought for ever richer benefits for their constituents like it just fine that way.
We had applicants who would only agree to be hired if we would promise to lay them off when they had qualified for EI. They liked to do their crafts during the autumn and sell them (under the table for cash) at the Christmas craft fairs. Now you know why there are so many bad crafts in Atlantic Canada: it is your tax dollars at work.
Throughout the region, many employers keep people on just long enough to get them stamped up, and then lay them off to cycle more people through the system. The social pressure to do so is enormous, because a few months’ work guarantees each person a year’s income.
In all these cases it is not lack of work that has sidelined these workers, but rather a settled habit of expecting to be paid not to work for part of the year.
The federal government has tried on occasion to place repeat EI recipients in full-time work, subsidizing their wages to ensure no loss of income. Those experiments failed because no one would participate. The reason? Many do not consider themselves “unemployed” when they’re on EI. Benefits are just part of their annual income.
Labour shortages don’t just exist in Alberta and Saskatchewan. They also exist in towns and cities down east, where they coexist with unemployment created by a dysfunctional EI system.
EI pays thousands to stay in seasonal work with little future, and to spend many months of the year idle while Ottawa must bring in temporary foreign workers.
Sure, we have to be vigilant that Ottawa doesn’t go overboard, forcing people who are rarely unemployed to take jobs for which they are patently unsuited. But that improbable prospect should not prevent us from clamouring for a system that does not trap entire communities on the EI-and-seasonal-work treadmill. The status quo, not the proposed reform, should shock the conscience of the nation.
Brian Lee Crowley is managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an independent non-partisan public policy think tank in Ottawa: macdonaldlaurier.ca.
It happens that my husband and I were volunteering at the Mustard Seed, a Calgary homeless shelter, last night. At 5 PM every evening the “clients” are bused in from downtown Calgary to this shelter, located in an industrial area of the city for the night. I was working the hygiene room, handing out towels and individual portions of soap, toothpaste, deodorant, shaving equipment, in short, everything anyone would need to get cleaned up.
Naturally, you strike up conversations and at one point a couple of guys who had the thickest eastern accents came by and I asked them when they’d come to Calgary and why. They both came a year ago for jobs, of course. They both got jobs immediately. One of them is still working at a $16/hr. job at a small manufacturing plant in the area of the shelter. The other said he wasn’t working, that he’d quit. I asked him why. Without shame he told me he quit the day he became eligible for EI. So, I said, “You’re not working and you could? You’re in Alberta, there’s plenty of jobs and you’re not working?” (my husband (recently retired) was the General Manager of a small manufacturing plant and was send ing to Cambodia for workers). I was sure he’d show some shame but that was not to be. He said, “I’ve worked for it, why shouldn’t I take it.” He either didn’t want to or was so dumb that he didn’t realize his EI contributions wouldn’t cover the cheques he was getting.
The other “client” was the opposite saying he couldn’t do what his friend was doing. He told me he had been afraid to even come to the shelter but his friend had persuaded him. Apartments are very expensive here and he wasn’t able to afford them. My husband would often suggest the guys working for him double or triple or even quadruple up and get a 2-3-4 bdr twn hse and share the rent.
So it appears even Calgary is importing this formerly, uniquely eastern, problem.
Perhaps you or Ms Jansen could explain to me how someone who quits a job is able to qualify for EI.
http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/ei/types/regular.shtml#eligible
I don’t think having quit a job would qualify as ” lost your employment through no fault of your own”.
And Crowley, have you even BEEN to Lunenburg in the off season. You could fire a cannon down those streets without hitting a tourist. The weekends we’ve spent there we were the only couple in the restaurants we dined in. I didn’t notice any that had closed but wondered how some that stayed open managed to do so.
My son is now working in food service and only able to get 15 hours/wk for the summer. He’d like to get full time hours but only the Phillipino imports get full time. He’s applying at other places now and hopefully will be able to tell his current employer to “shove it”. And no doubt they’ll whine boo hoo to Harper that they can’t keep workers, and need to import more from the Phillipines.
There are 2 sides to every story, and you’ve certainly written only your own prejudiced side here. No doubt there are those who abuse the system, but they are in no way the majority. And the EI abusers are NOT the only ones with a sense of entitlement. There are many idle capitalists who think they are entitled to maximum profits by paying their employees as little as possible. And when the free market doesn’t work in their favor they whine to the Conservatives to change the rules for them. Not capable of making a business work in this climate they want the added advantage of third world workers with third world expectations. And yet they want the first world advantages that Canada affords them with first world customers.
You want Phillipino workers, perhaps you ought to open your business in the Phillipines.
Run your business like a business you lazy capitalists.