Dear Editor:
I agree with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. The federal government is inappropriately using the Employment Insurance fund as a cash cow. But the solution is not to turn employment insurance into a privatized savings plan, as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation bizarrely suggests in its latest report.
More correctly named at inception as Unemployment Insurance, our national plan is meant to provide temporary income assistance to workers who lose their job due to circumstances beyond their control. Starting in 1940, financial assistance to unemployed workers was accepted as part of our social security safety net in recognition of the fact that a term of employment was largely outside the control of the worker, that there was an absence of any guarantee whatsoever of long-term - never mind lifetime - employment income. Over the succeeding decades, Parliament developed the current model of a self-sufficient income program funded by mandatory contributions by both the worker and the employer. And, left to its own devices, it works just fine.
The problem is that recent federal governments have turned that simple socially responsible concept into an ideological shell game. Amendments to the Employment Insurance Act have made it harder and harder for unemployed workers to access the fund. In fact, it has got to the point that more money is going in than is coming out. But, instead using the surplus money in innovative ways to further ease the debilitating impact of unemployment, the federal government blatantly scoops it up and dumps it into general revenue where it is used to add "balance" to the budget.
You don't stop this kind of political piracy by advocating a replacement system that only benefits those who somehow manage to stay employed and, thus, don't need to use their "savings" as a stopgap measure. You stop it by demanding that the federal government use the employment insurance fund only for the benefit of those who find themselves jobless.
You stop it by removing the power of the federal government to raid funds that rightfully belong to the people it is meant to help.
Bill Brassington, Burnaby
