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The real culture of dependency: In defence of Atlantic Canada | rabble.ca

“Flaherty, recalling his own years spent toiling as a referee in the wretched, undervalued and invisible Canadian hockey industry, posited that “the only bad job is not having a job.” Most unemployment in Canada, viewed through Flaherty’s diamond-encrusted monocle, is the result of jobless people being too choosy about which jobs they’ll do.

The rest of it, apparently, is the result of laziness.

That’s what the National Post’s Sarah Boesveld oh-so-subtly suggests in her article, based on a series of confessional interviews with people-who-have-friends-who-might-have-at-one-time-spent-a-few-extra-months-on-EI.

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EI is the only thing that allows seasonal industries to survive in our day and age. EI lets employers off the hook for three or six months of the year, so that when they’re not making money, they’re not paying anyone.

There are two alternatives to seasonal workers going on EI: employers could continue to pay them all year round, or they could resort to subsistence living in the off-months. If either of those scenarios happened, the economic consequences would be disastrous. When people have money, they spend it. That’s what we need. That’s why we’re in a flap over Canadians shopping in the U.S. That’s why the ’50s were so prosperous for so many people and we’re in so much debt trying to maintain old consumer standards with lower incomes today. That’s why wage stagnation is followed by economic recession. Why that’s so difficult a lesson to learn is beyond us.

If middle-class people want to eat lobster in the summer, bite into Annapolis Valley apples in the fall, haul the kids to PEI for vacation in June, golf at Dundee Resort in July, listen to fiddle music and get plastered on George Street or the Liquor Dome in August, and then forget about everything east of Montreal for the rest of the year, they’re going to have to damned well deal with the consequences, and one of the main consequences is EI. In that sense, EI is for you, Ontario and Alberta. Is your PEI Dirt Shirt feeling a little tight?

The response to this line of thought is predictable. “There’s a third alternative to EI,” the privileged silver-spooners and wealthy-person sycophants will say: those out-of-workers should move somewhere else when the seasonal employment dries up. To that, we say, are you serious? While your version of “summering” in one place and “wintering” in another is a good way to stay tanned all year round, the one you propose for the wage labourers that prop up your privilege is far from sunny. It breaks up families and it destroys communities.

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In this rendering of the way the world works, EI should be reserved only for the imaginary people who lose their jobs in the context of full-employment — the last people without jobs in the entire country, as if the job market was a game of musical chairs.”