Treat EI and Senate equally
It was hard times in the Maritimes, with the collapse of the cod fishery driving many down the road to points west.
The people who stayed had to find ways to get their stamps — bits of paper that showed they had worked for 10 weeks — which qualified them for 42 weeks of unemployment insurance.
Everyone was in on the racket. Fish plant owners would lay someone off after they got their stamps and hire somebody else, so that two fathers in a village could get their pogey that winter, and the province launched all kinds of 10-week make-work projects.
It’s easy to shake your head at the waste and foolishness, but there were a lot of hockey sticks under Christmas trees that wouldn’t otherwise have been there. The dole took the edge off the worst suffering.
But it’s no way to live, hanging on from fishing season to fishing season, collecting stamps and sitting on your backside the rest of the year, and I don’t think it’s fair to the people who pay into the system across the country.
Because of that, I am in favour of reforming the system, but I was afraid of what would happen when the federal Tories announced EI reforms. If they cut too fast and deep, they risked sucking too much money out of communities that have relied on EI for generations, scooping up all the toys from under the tree like the Grinch, hollowing out eastern communities, which might be good news for Fort McMurray but disastrous for small towns struggling to maintain a tax base.
The measures they have taken have for the most part been sensible if a bit harsh, a nudge toward the Tim Hortons counter to those who have grown too accustomed to cashing cheques paid for by the sweat of others.
The reforms require recipients to actively search for a job, and prevent them from turning down jobs that pay less or are farther away.
Communities in Quebec and Atlantic Canada that rely on seasonal industries are going to suffer, and the government has not rolled out a regional development strategy, as it ought to have, but the changes are, on balance, a step in the right direction.
They went too far, though, when they decided to randomly send inspectors to recipients’ homes to check up on them, a pilot project to find EI cheats.
Until now, inspectors have relied on snitches to find fraud artists who are picking up pogey cheques while working under the table or lying on a beach.
Now they are sending a bunch of inspector Clouseaus to knock on doors to make sure recipients are typing up resumes rather than drinking beer.
It is too much. If this government was demonstrating the same kind of vigilance on all expenditures, I might be sympathetic, but that is emphatically not the case.
For all its bluster about counting pennies, this government is a soft touch for gazebos, rinks and snowmobile clubs, sprinkling dollops of politically advantageous pork wherever it seems likely to win votes, exactly like every previous government.
Then there’s the infuriating Economic Action Plan ads. The government is blowing tens of millions of your tax dollars telling you how great it is.
And they are not always that vigilant with the money they give to their own.
The extent to which this bunch seemed different from the gang that preceded them on this score was a function of their newness.
As the last government had David Dingwall proclaiming, quite correctly, that he was entitled to his entitlements, we now have Sen. Mike Duffy defending his entitlements, although he acknowledges receiving some entitlements to which he was not, strictly speaking, entitled.
Duffy received a $40,000 residential subsidy because he signed a declaration asserting his primary residence is in Prince Edward Island, although he appears not to have paid taxes, voted or received health care there.
Duffy says the forms and rules are confusing, and I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, because I like him, but they are not confusing, and collecting that money is exactly the same as filling out EI forms incorrectly.
I would like the government to treat those two sins — filing a fake EI claim and filing a false declaration of primary residence — in exactly the same way.
There should not be one rule for senators and another for fish plant workers, who smell worse but are more honest than a lot of politicians.
If it’s OK for Duffy to just pay back the money he received as result of an incorrectly filled out form, then it should also be OK for people who fill out those EI forms incorrectly to just pay the money back.
And neither Duffy nor jobless fish-plant workers should have inspectors popping by their frigging houses unannounced.