I hope your wife’s collective agreement is better than my wife’s… She is also a teacher, and doesn’t get top up for periods that she would not normally be working. In our case, we lost out on benefits during the holiday break. Having a July baby would have lost us a lot of money!

Best of luck!

The fact is EI has been raided to dole out pork by both parties. The Liberals did it in areas with seasonal employment, as Al points out. The Cons are no better. They want to allow the self-employed to opt to pay into EI and be eligible for parental benefits. Guess who is going to opt in? The self-employed who are planning on getting pregnant would opt into EI, collect benefits when the baby is born and then opt out! I don’t blame them; that’s what I would do as well. The point is EI has been raided to pay out special groups that vote a certain way by both parties. I don’t see how the Cons are any different than Liberals when it comes to it.

There are armies of policy analysts who examine these issues every day. It’s not like there are many obvious, inexpensive enhancements that can be made to the program, or else they would have been made already. As I said earlier, there are pluses and minuses to EI. The reality that many people think it’s too generous, and many people think it’s too stingy is a good indication that it’s decently balanced.

I wouldn’t pin this solely on the Conservatives, by the way. The program has been status quo for a long while, which includes both Liberal and Conservative governments.

But you’ll never hear a suggestion like that from conservatives.

Secondly, the way eligibility and benefit rules have been set up, the program is more generous to people in economically depressed areas, which means people have a disincentive to move to areas that are more economically robust.

The program has pluses and minuses. Most people emphasize one side or the other.

EI is has some very strong economic arguments in its favor: The money is usually pumped directly into the economy, it is never saved. It allows a worker the time and flexibility to return to one’s preferred profession instead of being forced to take a lesser paying job. That increases productivity. And it directly helps the people most in need and avoid worse issues like foreclosures or bill delinquencies.

It is not a permanent handout, it is not putting people on the dole. Only a small fraction of people will stay on EI rather than find a job paying more, so that’s a red herring. EI is simply an effective way to smooth out the gyrations of the labor market.

But conservatives for some reason hate the idea of extending EI benefits during recessions. I simply cannot understand why that is.