Why our strategy is short-sighted

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.
In a reasonable world, there would be no need to stress these points. They would be obvious.These days, more people are working part-time at multiple jobs. Yet Canada's unemployment insurance system (which the federal government calls
"employment insurance" to make it sound more positive) is available only to those who work in good, steady, full-time jobs — that is, to people who are almost never out of work. The result? Fully 60 per cent of out-of-work Canadians don't qualify for employment insurance. In Ontario, almost three-quarters of the unemployed don't qualify; in Toronto the figure is a stunning 80 per cent.
Even in St. John's, Nfld., which is routinely labelled the pogey capital of Canada, roughly half of the unemployed can't get employment insurance.
Ditto with the so-called minimum wage. In Ontario, it's so low ($7.75 an hour) that it leaves someone earning this wage well below the poverty line.
As for labour law, forget it. The report points out, correctly, that Ontario doesn't have enough inspectors to enforce its own Employment Standards Act, with the result that some bosses routinely defraud their workers — in some cases refusing to pay them wages owed.