Here’s what’s screwed with the system. Bear with me for a bit while I lay the framework.
If I get fired for humping the boss’s leg at a board meeting, pissing on his wife on the way out the door, and driving over his Beemer in my beat up old F-350, I can get on welfare, social services, financial assistance, whatever you want to call it. I can get a cheque in my hands within, say, three weeks. I can probably also score some psychiatric treatment, but that’s another story.
If, however, I get laid off through circumstances beyond my control, I first have to try to qualify for Employment Insurance Benefits, which is fine for me because my situation isn’t that unusual. They tell you to get in there on the very day that you get your Record of Employment, which should come along no more than two weeks after your last day of work. It did and I did.
Then, after about a week, you get your first report card, which you have to fill out concerning the past two weeks and what you’ve been doing for money. Filling out this card leads you to believe that you will soon receive some Benefits. No sir. In spite of the fact that the web site says you will receive the deposit within five days of filing your bi-weekly report, you are also told that there is a waiting period before Benefits begin.
A what?
Yes. A waiting period. To let your bank account dry up.
If you get a standard severance package from your ex-place of employment, that amount of money is added to the basic two week waiting period, meaning if you get two weeks severance they make you wait two weeks on top of the basic two weeks, which is on top of the two weeks you’ve already been out of work waiting for your Record of Employment. So, in brief, if you lose your job you have to wait six to eight weeks before you can reasonably expect to get Benefits.
So, who wins? The government.
Your employer loses because they have to pay out your severance. I don’t really have much sympathy for them, but there it is nonetheless. You lose because whatever you get paid out in settlement gets eaten up while the government watches and waits. You might as well get fired. It pays faster.
It staggers the mind. What the hell am I paying into this for? The system is designed to fail. It’s designed to make sure you get your ass in gear and get another job. The theory is fine, but kids, what do you think happens? Seasonal workers routinely go on EI for half the year, and the government is fine with this despite the fact those fishermen make four times what I made.
Why am I paying into a system I can’t access? If I do what they want, and get a job soon enough that I don’t need to collect my Benefits, and I manage to do that my whole life, then where the hell has all that money gone? Should I accept that as the cost of living in Canada? I thought that’s what income tax was for? And all the sin taxes, visible and otherwise. Property tax. Fuel tax. Sales tax. GST. Blank Media tax, for the love of gawd. Levies and tarrifs out the yin yang, folks. That’s what I pay to live in Canada, and I’m just fine with that. It’s a stupid system, but I’ve learned to live with it.
But to pay specifically into Employment Isurance and then have it fail me by design? That’s ridiculous. Committee rule at its very worst. Clearly not designed by anyone recently and temporarily un-jobbed.
So I’m with Grant. I’ll opt-out, thank you very much. Screw the system. What’s the point? So others can ride the free train I’m paying for? Screw them.
Find me a party with the balls to abolish hopelessly entangled, ridiculously archaic, blindly committee-driven government policy and I will not only vote for that party- I may actually get involved.
Ummmmm, that’s the Canadian Alliance Party. But you were too busy praising Jean Chretien and the Liberals. The most “hopelessly entangled, ridiculously archaic, blindly committee-driven government” anywhere. I suppose you will put your support behind Paul Martin now and we’ll have more of the same.
COMMENT:
I’d have to have a gun in my mouth to vote for the Alliance party. And why in the world do you think Chretien or the Liberal party are responsible for the condition of the safety net? The most you can lay on them is that they didn’t do anything to help the situation. For the love of all that is holy, Buddy, I wish you’d stop giving the knee-jerk reaction and think about things like this. The safety net we have now is the result of incremental committee-driven policy changes over the past seventy years, and no party I’ve heard of is going to do anything to fix it. Seriously, why do so many people think it’s an acceptable answer to just blame the new guy, or the last guy? That’s so short sighted and it’s why we got into this mess in the first place. Long view, Buddy. Try to get your mind around the long view.
All I have to say is thank gawd that I have been working at the club for the past 5 nights. My bank account (and sanity) are doing A-OK.
I think my first bit of E.I. kicks in at the beginning of March.
Re: EI….. as far as I knew….. if you quit or get fired you don’t qualify for it, or welfare, yer fooked!
Honest Paul Martin IS part of the blame for as finance minister, he could have lowered the EI contributions we all pay, but no. Instead he continued to collect an incredible amount of dough and now has a rather huge war chest full of money to do with what he pleases, and of course will go to Liberal Old Boys who do the party good. It pizzisses me right off. Pork barrel politics is what the Liberals are all about. But who else is there to vote for? I’m sorry, I don’t see another alternative at all. I will either not vote next federal election, or hold my nose and vote Liberal…..prolly the former though. I will save my vote for the provincial election next year, which should be a doozy!
Ah, the Liberals… The political party we love to hate. And yet we vote them in, term after term… And they continue to screw us, term after term. You think we’d learn!
Now, I could get all verbose and long-winded about the election trap that the Liberals have built and why they will rule Canada forever, or I could let the always intelligent, always witty and highly perceptive Rick Mercer make my point for me.
And I choose Rick.