Fair deal, poor coverage

Last week, two columns addressed the recommendations on EI and other issues released by the Fair Deal Coalition. I held off on commenting at that time in hopes that more details (either in terms of the content of the report itself, or at least in terms of reaction) would go public in the meantime.

Unfortunately that hasn't happened, making it seem all too likely that the Coalition's apparent goal of turning public attention to the issues has already fallen by the wayside. (That's particularly a shame given how easy it would presumably be for the Coalition to at least make the report publicly available through a website.) But before EI reform falls off the radar once again, I'll take a quick spin through some of the key points from the columns.

First, from Thomas Walkom, discussing the difficulty in implementing many of the report's recommendations to stop asking Canada's less wealthy citizens to bear the brunt of as many policy choices as is currently the case:

Sometimes, it's important to underline the obvious. Unemployment insurance should be available to the unemployed. A minimum wage should bear some relationship to the cost of staying alive. Programs designed to reduce poverty should help the poor...

(T)he basic thrust of refocusing attention on poverty and income gaps makes sense. Exactly what will come of it though is unclear. Last year, Paul Martin's former Liberal government agreed to study tax-based wage subsidies, one of the task force's key recommendations. But there was no mention of the idea in this month's Conservative budget.

Other task force proposals will be equally hard political sells. The federal government is making good money from an employment insurance scheme into which almost everyone contributes and from which almost no one is able to draw. It's going to be reluctant to reform that cash cow.

So too with Queen's Park. The Harris government successfully downloaded much of the province's welfare costs onto municipalities. As the task force points out, that makes no sense. If the economy were to spiral into recession again, cities like Toronto could go bankrupt trying to pay their welfare bills.

But having managed to get rid of this cost, will any provincial government be anxious to pick it up again?

The task force says that if we don't act now, we're liable to get hammered later. In a reasonable country, that warning would be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, John Geddes noted that many of the planned program increases would be balanced out by an effort to turn EI into a true insurance program rather than a cash cow:

(A)n unusually wide-ranging alliance, representing everyone from hard-nosed Bay Street economists to soft-hearted social policy advocates, plans to try to make it hard for Harper to ignore (EI) entirely...While their recommendations will try to make sense of the whole ragged patchwork of income-support programs, the push for serious EI reform is the hottest hot button in the mix...

(T)he report's authors know they need to present their blueprint as one that could overcome stiff regional resistance. While they were keeping details secret last week, sources familiar with their proposals said they aim to make an EI overhaul saleable by at the same time calling for Ottawa to substantially boost its funding for other income-support measures. A key goal is to raise the incomes of the working poor, especially in big cities. When he was Paul Martin's finance minister last fall, Ralph Goodale summed up the problem when he noted that reductions in various forms of government assistance can cost an individual going back to work after a stint of unemployment 80 cents for every dollar earned in a new job.

Without seeing the report for myself, I don't have a ton to add to the commentary. It seems obvious enough that Canada would be better off taking the recommendations seriously, and at least taking a close look at the pros and cons of the Coalition's suggestions.

Unfortunately, based on the near-complete lack of coverage it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon. And the result is that many of the Canadians at the base of the country's economic growth will continue to see few of the spoils in the foreseeable future.