MacKinnon’s EI tinkering will not move the needle in our favour

Liberal Employment and Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon is moving to tinker with the Employment Insurance (EI) work sharing benefit in order to “provide stability to our sectors at a time of great unrest”.

 

The Minister is proposing to double the insurable maximum period a worker can earn, while on a work sharing EI benefit, from 38 to 76 weeks. This benefit is earned by a worker when there is a reduction of work due to a slow-down in the economy.

 

Work sharing, which became part of Unemployment Insurance (UI, now EI) in 1977, was also doubled during the covid pandemic (in 2020-21).

 

What’s important to know is 2 things: first, that at the time of the Unemployment Insurance Act in 1971, UI was paid out at 95% of a workers’ earnings. Now EI it is paid out at 55%. Secondly, in 1990, the then Liberal government pulled out of funding UI, leaving it to workers and employers, and from there the floodgates were opened by both successive Liberal and Tory governments to attack UI.

 

In 1996, the (Liberal) Chretien government renamed Unemployment Insurance “Employment Insurance”. It was telling move as the number of hours needed to earn “EI” was raised significantly, and the onus, as the name indicated, fell on the worker find work, despite being laid-off through no fault of their own. The new EI benefit, unlike the old UI benefit, now covered only 50% of the workforce, whereas UI had previously covered 75%.

 

With this kind of precedent from the Liberal Party, it should have come as no surprise that the Harper Tories (with Pierre Poilievre as one of its ministers), made deep cuts to EI, and finally, upon seeing a surplus in the EI fund, simply stole a significant portion of its surplus in 2015 (to the tune of $2.7 billion), and served it up as tax cuts to corporations.

 

MacKinnon has now simply trotted out the same benefit as during the covid crisis. No doubt he will be applauded for that. He shouldn’t be. Far from raising earnings from 55% back to 95%, which is what workers need to confront the effect of Trump’s tariffs, he has simply doubled the already paltry benefit, already announced by his own Liberal Party, and their Tory collaborators.

 

Maybe he could now turn his mind to doubling the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) from 25% to 50% of pre-retirement earnings, as the Canadian Labour Congress has called for. This would prevent harm from tariff induced price rises for retired workers. But not a peep from MacKinnon and his Liberals, and the rather loyal Tory opposition.

 

Since we as workers don’t have their ear – and the sad history of UI should leave us no doubt – it is worth noting what those who do have their ear have to say. According to chief executive of the Business Council of Canada (BCC), Goldy Heyer, who thanks Donald Trump for the “wake-up call”, “we must respond in kind when it comes to the overall competitiveness of Canada, which includes tax policy, regulations … the biggest issue I hear from my members is that we’re over-regulated”.

 

We best get ready to defend our hard-won rights: our gains, and our planet is on their menu.