Canada | Fed Budget, Mammoth Bill and EI system

The Conservative government says Canadians receiving an income under the Employment Insurance program will be required to lower their standards when looking for work or risk losing their benefits.

It’s a small step, but it should be the start of a major overhaul of a system that often seems to reward seasonal workers in regions with high unemployment, while punishing those who live in low-unemployment areas. As numerous studies have concluded, Canada’s EI system is not only inequitable, it discourages labour mobility and encourages dependency, even while thousands of jobs are unfilled in areas of high unemployment.

Canadians looking for work while collecting EI are currently entitled to turn down jobs that are “unsuitable,” which could be work in a different city or in a different occupation with dramatically lower pay. The federal government intends to redefine the term “suitable” in a way that would require unemployed workers to accept different or lower-paying jobs, although the precise terms haven’t been revealed, which will lead to unnecessary and likely extreme speculation.

It shouldn’t mean that a laid-off engineer would have to take a job on the bottle line in a brewery. If a professional is out of work, presumably he or she would use their unemployment benefits as a stop-gap measure while looking for work in the same field, even if it means relocating.

Nor should it mean a 50-year-old shoe salesman will have to start digging ditches, but the salesman might have to take a different job, even if it pays less.

via EI system no longer works – Winnipeg Free Press.