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My mom had no choice in the matter, she needed help and it was beyond any of our control. You can blame people for being reckless and irresponsible, but situations arise where people cannot work.

Our family and our government came through for us.

   

See? you missed my point entirely. Your mother is NOT the kind of person I'm referring to. How do you even relate what happened to your mother with what my brother did to himself?
AGAIN, I AM NOT AGAINST EI, I'M AGAINST THE 320 HOUR REQUIREMENT COUNT IGULA WANTS TO BRING IN!!!THIS IS A RECORDING

   

The kind of person you are referring to already has access to E.I., and probably doesn't need it.

There are other kinds of people who work part time jobs because that is all they can get, who may have trouble getting 700 hours in a recession.

I'm still confused how your brother relates to the E.I. thing.. So he had a big debt and a bunch of hours, so he collected E.I.? Or he only had 340 hours and the rules prevented him from screwing the system?

   

I understand that personal responsibility is a foreign concept to many die hard Libs and their supporters but, if you're still confused then try re-reading the posts. If yer still confused after that, then the money you spent on university should have been put to better use. I'm done.

   

personal responsiblity is important, but when we're in a recession and jobs are being lost in the hundreds of thousands you have to admit there's something larger going on than individual choices. The problem is structural and so the solution has to be structural too.

A 'liberal' looks at the Titanic disaster and asks why there weren't enough lifeboats for all the passengers. A conservative looks at the same event and says the victims who didn't manage to make it onto the few lifeboats available made "poor choices" and have nobody to blame but themselves for dying.

Let's not forget also that the EI program has massive surpluses. We still pay into EI at the same rate, the liberal gov't just restricted eligibility to the program to cut the nummber of people eligible to collect it. There's no reason to believe that making the benefit more accessible would require new money in the immediate future.

   

Beaver Feaver: I understand about the recession but 320 hours is a joke. I don't have a problem with accessability either. I'm concerned about the abuse that will stem from such short qualifications. When it used to be that way, the abuse was crazy.
I also understand there are a lot of low income people. I'm not trying to pick on them either. There's a difference between personal responsibility and ability.
I'm neither a conservative nor a liberal. I'm a liberal in some views and conservative in others. I don't believe you can successfully run a country using partisan politics these days. It takes common sense.
The Titanic example while cute, is totally superfluous to the argument. The poor choosers would have been those that locked themselves in their cabins and pretended it wasn't happening. Which is exactly what people do when they rack up huge amounts of debt, not for needs which are getting rather expensive('specially with all those Liberal taxes being piled on) but because they want a new car every 2 years. Or a 61" plasma TV. Or a phone that costs 2K for a 3 year contract, or a 100+DVD collection etc.., etc.., ad naseum
It's not exactly rocket science to figure out that if you make x dollars a year, you can't spend x.5 dollars a year and expect to survive. Even if you only spend x dollars per year, yer not leaving any room for an emergency.

Personally? I'd like to see an income cap put on EI. After you are earning a certain amount/year, you no longer qualify to collect.
Don't see why everyone should pay to support some guy that made say, 60-80K/ yr or more for 10 years or so and got laid off.

   

Remember though EI only pays a MAX of 55% of your insurable earnings or $474 a week, (whichever is LOWER) so I don't think there are really alot of people "couch surfing" while on EI, the hardship is its own motivator to return to the workforce.

There is a big societal problem with skyrocketing consumerism and consumer debt and declining savings rates, but this is something the government has both explicitly and implicitly encouraged through its tax and policy regimes. Loosening restrictions on lending and interest rates was the neo-liberal policty recommendation for offsetting stagnant wages. Let the workers borrow more instead of earn more and inflation will stay in check, the "logic" goes.

Also, a large portion of the working population that is at risk is not highly compensated executives, but hourly labourers, such as the auto industry and in the 45-55 age range where finding a new job that pays anything even close to the former is difficult.

What I'm trying to say is that we don't want to build a system that functions to redistribute people from good paying jobs to shitty little jobs delivering pizza and making telemarketing calls. An overly restrictive EI system can force people into those jobs and then trap them there by denying them the time they need to upgrade their skills and/or search for a real occupation.

I don't have a number for you - 320 vs 700 or 500 - but I think the number should bebased on the most recent economic data for a claimant's geographic area. If jobs in your town are turning over their workforce on average every 320 person-hours then 320 sounds totally appropriate.

As for the "poor choosers," its true that there will always be people who make poor choices in life and we can not design a system around these people, but if the 'system' is well designed, they will be outliers and anomalies and not statistically significant. BUT if we are saying that HALF the affected population made poor choices in life then really there is a larger issue than individual decisions.

Allow me another analogy if you will:

Suppose you work for the ministry of transportation and are in charge of road safety. At what point would you consider a particular intersection to be unsafe and in need of modification? If there was only one fatal crash in the past decade, one could assume the intersection is safe and blame that one driver. But if there is an ever-increasing amount of fatal crashes at that one intersection, at some point you would stop blaming the drivers and start looking for systemic or structural issues, correct? Maybe a traffic light needs to be installed, or maybe a visual obstruction needs to be cleared....

BUT more to your point, what if there is a lot of excessive speeding through that intersection, because the road is long and straight and there are no stop lights? Yes, its true that the drivers are breaking the law with deadly results, and if they would only drive properly there wouldn't be a problem. So do you allow the body count to pile up simply because "its their fault" or do you make changes to the environment that will discourage their behaviour? At this point ideology and a notion of how ppl "should" act collides with reality and what people are actually doing. At some point the unfavourable behaviour is so pervasive and commonplace that the system needs to be adjusted to recognize this reality.

So if your brother is only one out a million, I say screw him, but if his situation is typical of half of the unemployed then we need to take a hard look at how we react to that as the 'norm' rather the anomaly.

   

I can answer your last point right now and it's easy. Make a mandatory course for high school involving basic economics and money mangement. Since school is supposed to prepare you for adulthood, you'd think they could at least finish covering the basics. I think it was silly that when I was in high school (and maybe it's still the same) you needed 4 art credits (art, gym or music) to graduate. But not ONE course in the above mentioned disciplines. Unfortunately, there is still that nasty, 'I want it NOW trend' of self indulgence and the only way to even try and combat it is starting early in schools with teaching fiscal responsibility.

You said, "Also, a large portion of the working population that is at risk is not highly compensated executives, but hourly labourers, such as the auto industry and in the 45-55 age range where finding a new job that pays anything even close to the former is difficult."

Those that work in the auto industry are, or were, WELL compensated. The average auto worker hauls in around 60K gross/yr, as well as outstanding benefits. They are one sector that also makes more than enough to be able to save SOMETHING.
The 45-55 yr old group is still going to be better off taking a job that doesn't pay close to what they're used to, than receiving EI.

Do I agree with having EI? Of course. Does it need to be reformed? Hell yeah. But Iggy's plan will solve nothing at the moment. He's just pandering because he knows times are tough and hopes people will believe his BS will save them.
You do make a good point about indexing the required hours based on regional or city job turnover rates. But then again, places like McDonald's and its ilk would throw those figures totally out of whack.

   

What is really strange is that apprentices in skilled trades are forced on to E.I. during their training, and that same hardship imposed on them. Why not let them work on weekends and not penalize them at the very least.

   

I've been saying for years that schools should put the 'economics' in home economics and make it a mandatory course. Everything we're exposed to in mass media and pop culture conspires to drag us into consumer debt, buy copius amounts of things we don't need and can barely afford on store credit. Even the so-called "experts" in the newspaper columns and on news television often talked up refinancing mortgages and/or investing in "wealth builder" (ie high risk) investments because the stock market and real estate "always go up". Even well-intentioned people can be led astray and get caught up in a web of debt.

But I'm afraid that education might not be enough. McJobs are increasingly typical in this economy and are spreading beyond the traditional hospitality/entertainment sector. I have a friend that worked in IT support for IMB for 5 years as a "temporary" employee with no sick days, no benefits, no job security and no severance when they finally axed her without warning to "lower their labour costs".

Well, maybe the ones who have less than 320 hours are the most likely to NEED the benefit since tenured employees can (or should) be expected to have some savings. What I'd like to know is where the 320 number came from or did Ignatieff just pull it out of his ass?

   

It's last year I lost my job, during the recession. Not now while the recession is over... This is quite stupid.

We already have the largest deficit ever (Thanks Harper !!), why put us more into debt for.. nothing ?

   

Had you read the information provided from the Bank of Canada, you'd understand that us pulling out of the recession is directly tied to that of the stimulus spending.

   

Recession ain't over til its over:

And here is a telling story from just before the recession hit (added emphasis mine):



So there is no reason to believe that making EI more accessible would add to the debt, except for the fact the Harper gov't has basically been using EI contributions as general revenue as if it were a tax instead of using to fund EI as it was intended. So they would have to rework some of their stimulus projects and spending intitiatives to use tax revenue and not EI premiums.

   

Yeah sure... the "stimulus"... like if Keynesian economics can work now while it has never worked and specially put Japan in stagnation and debt during the 90s.

   

It's not true that it never worked...Keynesian economic theory dominated from the end of the Great Depression through the "golden age of capitalism" and the longest ever period of recorded growth that lasted until the late 60's - early 70's.

The Japanese recession was triggered by a build-up of bad debt in the country's banking system. Like the US today, money had been borrowed using inflated property values as security. Also like the US, the world was assured that safeguards were in place and that any failing bank would be helped out by others, through what was known as the 'convoy system'.

Japan tried many tactics from all sides of the political spectrum to recover, bank bail-outs, re-regulation and stimulus spending were among them. A large part of why it took nearly a decade to recover is because the government would not commit to one course of action and often took only half steps in any direction. But there's still a reason that Toyota and Honda and Sony are out-competing American competitors: the Keynesian-Fordist principles are still much more prominent over there. The country has high unionization rates, long-term relationships with its principle shareholders, among whom its labour unions and long-term business partners are included and a graduated pay scale for its executive class that doesn't have multi-millionaire CEO's focusing on short-term stock performance instead of long-term business performance.

   

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