Let’s face facts; a lot of Canadians think we easterners are sponges on their tax dollars. That’s not fair or true, but that is the image our Atlantic Premiers are embracing with their stance in the debate over the Employment Insurance (EI) program.

In the very near future, a report commissioned by the Atlantic Premiers to examine the federal government’s changes to the EI program will be released.

You can count on New Brunswick’s Premier David Alward to follow his Atlantic counterparts. This motley crew of premiers will likely defend the broken EI system. They will surely demand yet more money be put into a program that fails to work for seasonal workers, who’ve become reliant on EI, or the average worker who pays into the program every pay cheque and gets nothing out of it. In doing so, the premiers will fuel the prevalent stereotype that Atlantic Canadians are pogey-seeking lugs.

By focusing their gaze on the recent changes, the Atlantic premiers overlook the much bigger problems caused by the EI program. Most Atlantic Canadians are not using EI. They get up every morning and go to work, they pay their EI taxes and rarely, if ever, draw on the program. And those EI taxes are costing more and more very year. Over the past five years, EI taxes on Canadian workers have gone up 25 per cent to $914 per year. Employers are now paying $1,279 per employee. So why are our premiers not fighting for these working taxpayers who are digging into their pocket to pay ever increasing taxes for a program they never use? 

The EI system is not helping get people back to full-year, full-time jobs. Just look at communities with high EI usages and job vacancies not being filled at same time.  For example, in St. Stephen, rural New Brunswick, Ganong Bros., Limited hires foreign workers because it claims it can’t find local people to fill their jobs. At the same time XX,XXX in rural New Brunswick are collecting EI at any given time.

The system doesn’t even work for seasonal workers anymore. The same federal government that once encouraged seasonal workers to take EI now treats them like common criminals, sending inspectors to their homes, harassing them with phone calls.

The EI program was set up to help people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves unemployed and need money until they get their next job. It shouldn’t have been built to compensate seasonal workers. If we decide there is some need to subsidize older seasonal workers, fine, but then let’s create a separate program for that. One that has measureable objectives and accountability.

Maintaining the current EI system means that the problems we have today will persist, our regional unemployment will remain high, our wages low and our young people will keep moving west.

We can do better than this.

Let’s scrap the EI the system altogether and replace it with EI savings accounts that are simpler, universal and accountable.

EI saving accounts mean that instead of sending your money to bureaucrats in Ottawa, that money will go in your own personal EI account. If you are unemployed you can draw upon that account. Whatever funds are left in the account at retirement would become savings for you to keep.

For example, in a dual-income household where both earners make over $47,400, if they first started contributing to their saving account at 25 years old, they would have $1,065,000 in the account at age 65.

Instead of fighting for the broken ways of the past, our premiers should be looking for new solutions that will break the cycle of dependency and represent the region for what it is, one made up of hard working, innovative people who both want to and are working at changing their region for the future.

Kevin Lacey is Atlantic Director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, you can find more information at taxpayer.com