With my colleague Nicolas Miot, between September 14 and 22, we walked 200 km, from Montreal to Ottawa, to demand a reform of employment insurance. This program, supposed to protect workers against the vicissitudes of employment, presents in many respects all the characteristics of a dysfunctional and arbitrary organization. This is explained: during the 1990s, the coverage and the protections were considerably reduced, redefining the parameters of this system ever since.
It is at this point that employment insurance is probably, of all the existing social programs in the country, federal and provincial levels combined, the one in the worst shape. One that would require urgent modernization, with the injection of a good dose of justice and the establishment of a new balance.
The world of work has changed. A significant proportion of employment is of a precarious nature: part-time or contractual, fixed term or not, on call or with split hours, seasonal, decompartmentalised, often ethereal. This is a reality that runs through all industrialized societies. About a third of the active workforce works under such conditions, including many women, young people and the elderly.
And we marched to demand this reform that we have been promised for a long time, but which never comes. Many, in fact, have been the formal commitments made by the party in power in Ottawa, the “speeches from the Throne”, the letters of mandate, the electoral platforms, the solemn declarations… Last year, in the spring, all the indicators were green to initiate this reform process. Commentators and observers of the federal political scene were abounding in this direction. Instead, we were announced a consultation process, itself delayed by the September 2021 federal election.
We were good players. We participated in those consultations. Each meeting meant an important work of research, documentation, argumentation, in order to be at the maximum of our capacities. This is asking a lot of an organization already overloaded with work and whose means are very limited.
In the spring of 2022, on April 7, the day of the federal budget, there was once again every indication that a plan for reform would be presented, following consultations concluded at the end of February. Indeed, the mandate letter (December 2021) of Minister Carla Qualtrough, responsible for the employment insurance program, specified a very clear deadline for implementing this reform: summer 2022. Instead, it is rather a second phase of consultation that was announced.
We remained good players, knowing very well that in this matter, everything has already been said, the problems and the solutions heard, and this, for many years. In total, we participated in about ten of these consultation tables.
calm the anger
During the crisis, and after the collapse of the EI system in the spring of 2020 due to staggering pressure on its archaic structures, the government introduced temporary measures that had significantly improved the program, particularly under the aspects of admissibility (work time necessary to qualify and reduction of the sanctions attached to the reasons for termination of employment). There was an expiry date for these measures: September 24, 2022. Is it a fault to have (still) believed that a reform would take over from these measures? Yet that is what we were told.
It is rather the unacceptable return to the status quo that has taken place. And it is to denounce such a situation that we marched from Montreal to Ottawa: so that the words engaged mean something. Is it too much to ask? Naive ? Should everything be stopped? Take refuge in disenchantment? Maintain disillusionment?
We had to walk. Calm that anger. I am 63 years old and I thought I was in good shape. Walking 200 kilometres, with an average of 25 km per day, was nevertheless a real challenge. I took full measure of it in the rain between Montebello and Thurso when, during the first hours of walking, each step felt like a blow received on the heel of the foot.
I did not lose my temper on the way. On the contrary, the more I thought—and that was all there was to do—the more I realized that they had “built a beautiful big boat for us.”
Do an act of pedagogy
And these kinds of arguments are being used today: the crisis is over, unemployment rates are low, there is a shortage of manpower… why bother to reform employment insurance? Employer spokespersons who had pledged to support a particular reform plan reneged on their word, others deployed intense lobbying activity to counter any desire for change, arguing that employment insurance is not a social program, but rather a tax, and that this tax should not be increased. Misinforming in passing about the nature of this program and the fact that the contribution rate we are currently experiencing is the lowest since 1980.
What fallacies to claim that improving employment insurance would bring workers (these idle beings) back into unemployment! As if having a health insurance system makes people sick, or car insurance results in throwing yourself under the wheels of a car…
Social programs have a fundamentally simple and humanistic purpose: to give ourselves, as a society, social protections to deal with possible problems, disasters.
We must not wait for the next crisis to repair the social safety net, nor for the accentuation of climatic disturbances and their consequences on employment to work in such a direction. If there is a rise of the right and of a discourse aimed at the destructuring of state policies, we must respond with even more vigor, more courage, more vision and do an act of pedagogy, never stop explain the purpose of social contributions, taxes, and state policies. We are here and nowhere else. Naive perhaps, but fiercely determined to see justice done.