....and the premise would seem to be that you had to be employed and have to meet certain requirements.The rolls of the unemployed in Canada continue to grow – by another 45,000 last month, according to a Statistics Canada report yesterday. Many or most of them won't be eligible for employment insurance (EI), ...
- Lorne Gunter: The scam we call 'Employment Insurance'
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There is almost nothing about Canada's Employment Insurance (EI) program that is as it appears. Even its name is a dodge.
The plan does not insure against employment; that would be absurd. It insures against unemployment. Yet, in keeping with the disingenuous nature of the program, the name was changed to EI (from Unemployment Insurance) more than a decade ago in the naive hope that somehow the superficial switch in branding would encourage beneficiaries to find and keep jobs.
Nor can it rightly be called "insurance" -- at least, not in the sense in which that word is normally used. In regions where unemployment is chronically high, premiums are no higher than in regions where workers are unlikely ever to claim benefits. In fact, in high-unemployment regions, workers can work for such short periods before qualifying that they often pay only a few hundred dollars in premiums before qualifying for thousands in benefits.
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