MacLeans:
A fundamental misunderstanding of what EI is, what EI does, and why this change is bad.
Say I work a white collar job, and I am laid off by no fault of my own. I think we all recognize that I am able to walk down the street and get a job at McDonald's. Some people would say "Then what's the need for EI? Look, you can get a job". But this makes no sense. If I have worked my whole life towards career advancement, got relevant degrees, accumulated experience, got good performance reviews, etc. why ought I voluntarily accept a massive backslide in pay, prestige, and career prospects? EI makes it so that I don't have to. It is a system designed to enable me to spend the brief period after I lose my employment searchable for a comparable replacement job or getting my ducks in a row before transitioning into a new industry. It's not designed to compel me to take a job, it's designed to make it so I don't feel compelled to take a job.
The one hour commute rule functions similarly. A one hour commute costs a significant amount (in bus costs this is perhaps $1000+ less salary per year, in car costs even more. Invoicing mileage at the Revenue Canada standard of $0.55/km, that's perhaps $8,000 in costs a year). A one hour commute significantly deflates hourly salary. Working 8 hours a day with a 5 minute commute at $20 an hour makes your effective wage $19.51 an hour. Working 8 hours a day with a one hour commute at $20 an hour makes your effective wage $16 an hour. That's a >15% wage suppression effect. Some people voluntarily take jobs with extremely long commutes to help control living costs or for career advancement or whatever, but compelling someone to do so hurts workers, and it especially hurts middle class workers. It also has a negative effect on families, so GG conservatives.
The "problem" of seasonal EI dependence, such as it is, is entirely separate. If the government has simply had enough of fishermen free-riding some of the year, perhaps they ought say so, instead of applying rules to the vast majority of people who occasionally use EI in the course of their life. But the hilarity of a government with a rounding error number of seats in Atlantic Canada running a policy whose stated purpose is to brow-beat the Atlantic Canadian culture of dependency (* actual Harper quote) is too much. Federal mismanagement of natural resources has contributed to the decline in fish stocks (along with, yes, the overfishing by Stupid Newfies!!!!--but also overfishing by foreign fishers from the Iberian peninsula that the federal government didn't take seriously enough until it was too late). Federal mismanagement of the seal hunt file and failure to blunt lobbying efforts by animal groups in Europe have significantly impacted the ability of sealers to make a living. Atlantic Canadians remember the long and protracted dispute between the feds and Newfoundland over the Atlantic Accord. You guys know how Alberta bleats on about how having oil revenues expropriated by the feds in the name of the national interest was the Single Most Evil Thing Ever And Curse Trudeau's Name? The only difference between that and this is that our oil ended up being under water instead of under land. I say these things not to haul out the laundry list of grievances Atlantic Canada has against the federal government, but rather to observe that programs that support seasonal workers are in part an admission that everyone has not done enough to make employment in those areas sustainable. People aren't free-riding, they're using the system as designed: to make up for the lack of opportunities available. If you remove that system, it's not like the people in question won't need to eat. And no, "take another job" is not credible--people from small rural towns are tired of being told to get retrained to be hairdressers at age 50 when they live in a town of 100 people, 20 of whom are being told to retrain as hairdressers.
MacLean's? What a joke. Another one in the long line of voices from the Canadian core maligning, smearing, or ignoring the periphery. Wonder when they'll go back to warning old-stock Canadians about the threat posed to them by Canada's "Too Asian" Universities?
