Liberals move to add weeks to EI, benefits for workers, parents
OTTAWA — The Trudeau Liberals sought Friday to get ahead of a looming benefits panic, announcing plans to add extra weeks of income support for unemployed workers and parents at home with children because of the pandemic.
The government plans to add 12 weeks of eligibility to the $500-a-week Canada Recovery Benefit and the Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit, raising the maximum number of weeks available to 38 from 26.
The federal sickness benefit will be expanded to four weeks from two so workers can stay home if they’re feeling ill or have to isolate because of COVID-19.
Employment insurance eligibility is also promised to be stretched to allow people to receive up to 50 weeks of benefits, rather than 26, for any claims filed since late September.
Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, said the extra weeks should be a major relief for those who worried about losing support at the end of next month. But he suggested the extension may not be enough to bridge to better times.
Labour groups have asked the Liberals to extend benefits until the end of the year, which is how long they believe it might take before the workers in hardest-hit industries get back on the job.
“The one thing that nobody has been able to predict is when are we going to get to the other side,” Yussuff said.
“As the government prepares for the budget, they may yet have to make a further announcement to figure out how we’re going to support people until the job numbers are starting to return to the level they were prior to the pandemic.”
Canada’s labour market reversed months of gains in December and January, as lockdowns sent employment rates back to where they were in August, leaving the country short 858,300 jobs of pre-pandemic levels.
The government had planned to review eligibility for the recovery benefits at the start of January and the jobs numbers helped inform the decision to add more weeks, said Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough.
The extra weeks for the recovery benefits will provide income support to June for those who have needed it since their inception, roughly the same time that business support like the wage subsidy is also to expire.
Federal officials will see what needs to come next for workers and businesses depending on how things look, Qualtrough said in an interview.
“We just are constantly figuring out the balance between all these programs, to minimize any kind of negative impact, but also to maximize labour-force attachment,” she said, “and preparations that are underway to kick things into gear when the country is vaccinated.”
The government’s most recent figures show it has provided over $11.6 billion through the three recovery benefits launched in the fall to replace the Canada Emergency Recovery Benefit.
A further $13.5 billion has been spent on regular EI benefits, with about two million people currently receiving the income support. That doesn’t include special benefits like parental leave.
The government estimates the cost to extend the benefits at $6.7 billion, and a further $5.4 billion for EI.
Extending the recovery benefits can happen through regulation, which is simpler than
the law that needs to be passed to extend EI eligibility.
And once changes are made, provincial governments would have to update worker protection rules to accommodate the extra weeks of sickness and caregiving leave.
Conservative workforce critic Raquel Dancho said in a statement that her party supported getting help to unemployed workers, and put the onus on the government to craft a plan to create jobs across every sector of the economy.
“The Liberals need to present a budget, their first in two years, that will get Canadians back to work and bring our economy back to life,” the statement said.
NDP employment critic Daniel Blaikie welcomed the additional weeks, but noted it doesn’t solve concerns that the sick leave can’t be taken one or two days at a time.
“It’s a good start, but there is a lot that is still not working well with these programs,” he said in an interview. “It’s going to take more than an announcement of simply extending benefits in order to get to the heart of some of these things.”
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas’ grid operators said Friday that the electrical system has returned to normal for the first time since a winter storm knocked out power to more than 4 million customers.
Smaller outages still remained Friday. But Bill Magness, president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, says the grid again has enough capacity to provide power throughout the entire grid.
As electricity and heat returned to Texas homes, water problems remained as cities continued boilwater notices and repaired broken pipes and water mains.
More than 190,000 homes and businesses remained without power in Texas according to poweroutage.us, down from about 3 million two days earlier.
Winter storms also left more than 330,000 from Virginia to Louisiana without power and about 71,000 in Oregon were still enduring a weeklong outage following a massive ice and snow storm.
The snow and ice moved into the Appalachians, northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, and later the Northeast as the extreme weather was blamed for the deaths
of at least 58 people, including a Tennessee farmer trying to save two calves that apparently wandered into a frozen pond and 17year-old Oklahoma girl who fell into a frozen pond.
A growing number of people have perished trying to keep warm. In and around the western
Texas city of Abilene, authorities said six people died of the cold — including a 60-year-old man found dead in his bed in his frigid home. In the Houston area, a family died from carbon monoxide as their car idled in their garage.
Federal Emergency Management Agency acting administrator Bob
Fenton said Friday that teams were in Texas with fuel, water, blankets and other supplies.
“What has me most worried is making sure that people stay warm,” Fenton said on “CBS This Morning,” while urging people without heat to go to a shelter or warming centre.
Rotating outages for Texas could return if electricity demand rises as people get power and heating back, said Dan Woodfin, the council’s senior director of system operations.
Adding to the misery: The weather jeopardized drinking water systems. Authorities ordered 7 million people — a quarter of the population of the nation’s secondlargest state — to boil tap water before drinking it, following the record low temperatures that damaged infrastructure and pipes. In Abilene, a man who died at a health care facility when a lack of water pressure made medical treatment impossible.
Water pressure dropped after lines froze and because many people left faucets dripping to prevent pipes from icing, said Toby Baker, executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Abbott urged residents to shut off water to prevent more busted pipes and preserve municipal system pressure.
President Joe Biden said he called Abbott on Thursday evening and offered additional support from the federal government to state and local agencies.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said residents will probably have to boil tap water in the fourthlargest U.S. city until Sunday or Monday.
WASHINGTON — In his first big appearance on the global stage, President Joe Biden called on fellow world leaders to show together that “democracies can still deliver” as he underscored his administration’s determination to quickly turn the page on Donald Trump’s “America First” approach.
Biden, in a virtual address Friday to the annual Munich Security Conference, said it was a critical time for the world’s democracies to “prove that our model isn’t a relic of our history.”
“We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future direction of our world,” Biden said in the address just after taking part in his first meeting as president with fellow Group of Seven world leaders. That debate is “between those who argue that — given all of the challenges we face, from the fourth industrial revolution to a global pandemic — autocracy is the best way forward and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting those challenges.”
Biden made his address to a global audience as his administration has begun reversing Trump administration policies.
He said that the U.S. stands ready to rejoin talks about reentering the 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration. The Biden administration announced Thursday its desire to reengage Iran, and it took action at the United Nations aimed at restoring policy to what it was before President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.
Biden also spoke out about the economic and national security challenges posed by Russia and China, as well as the two-decade war in Afghanistan, where he faces a May 1 deadline to remove the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops under a Trump administration negotiated peace agreement with the Taliban.
As he underlined challenges facing the U.S. and its allies, Biden tried to make clear that he’s determined to repair a U.S.-Europe relationship that was strained under Trump, who repeatedly questioned the value of historic alliances.
‘I know the past few years have strained and tested the transatlantic relationship,” Biden said. “The United States is determined to reengage with Europe, to consult with you, to earn back our position of trust and leadership.”
His message was girded by an underlying argument that democracies — not autocracies — are models of governance that can best meet the challenges of the moment, according to a senior administration official who previewed the president’s speech for reporters.
At the G-7, administration officials said, Biden focused on what lies ahead for the international community as it tries to extinguish the public health and economic crises created by the coronavirus pandemic. He said the U.S. will soon begin releasing $4 billion for an international effort to bolster the purchase and distribution of coronavirus vaccine to poor nations, a program that Trump refused to support.
Both the G-7 and the annual security conference
were held virtually because of the pandemic.
Biden’s turn on the world stage came as the U.S. on Friday officially rejoined the Paris climate agreement, the largest international effort to curb global warming. Trump announced in June 2017 that he was pulling the U.S. out of the landmark accord, arguing that it would undermine the American economy.
Biden announced the U.S. intention of rejoining the accord on the first day of his presidency, but he had to wait 30 days for the move to go into effect. He has said that he will bake considerations about climate change into every major domestic and foreign policy decision his administration faces.
“This is a global existential crisis,” Biden said.
His first foray into international summitry will inevitably be perceived by some as simply an attempted course correction from Trump’s agenda. The new president, however, has made clear that his domestic and foreign policy agenda won’t be merely an erasure of the Trump years.
“I’m tired of talking about Donald Trump,” Biden lamented earlier this week at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee.
Biden on the campaign trail vowed to reassert U.S. leadership in the international community, a role that Trump often shied away from while complaining that the U.S. was too frequently taken advantage of by freeloading allies.
To that end, Biden encouraged G-7 partners to make good on their pledges to COVAX, an initiative by the World Health Organization to improve access to vaccines, even as he reopens the U.S. spigot.
Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from WHO and refused to join more than 190 countries in the COVAX program. The Republican former president accused WHO of covering up China’s missteps in handling the virus at the
start of the public health crisis that unraveled a strong U.S. economy.
It remains to be seen how G-7 allies will take Biden’s calls for greater international co-operation on vaccine distribution given that the U.S. refused to take part in the initiative under Trump and that there are growing calls for the Democrat’s administration to distribute some U.S.-manufactured vaccine supplies overseas.
French President Emmanuel Macron has called on the U.S. and European nations to allocate up to 5% of current vaccine supplies to developing countries — the kind of vaccine diplomacy that China and Russia have begun deploying.
And earlier this week, U.N. SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres sharply criticized the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, noting 10 countries have administered 75% of all vaccinations.
Biden, who announced last week that the U.S. will have enough supply of the vaccine by the end of July to inoculate 300 million people, remains focused for now on making sure every American is vaccinated, administration officials say.
Allies will also were listening closely to hear what Biden had to say about a looming crisis with Iran.
Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency this week that it would suspend voluntary implementation next week of a provision in the 2015 deal that allowed U.N. nuclear monitors to conduct inspections of undeclared sites in Iran at short notice unless the U.S. rolled back sanctions by Feb. 23.
“We must now make sure that a problem doesn’t arise of who takes the first step,” German chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin after a videoconference of G-7 leaders. “If everyone is convinced that we should give this agreement a chance again, then ways should be found to get this agreement moving again.”