Perna,

I can see where you're coming from, and if I honestly thought the three days "saved" by not paying me would help someone else, I'd feel less bad about it. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. EI is federally administered and funded through a payroll tax that the employer and employees both contribute to. It used to be that EI had a surplus and that 80% of people who lost their job qualified for some period of benefits. Then the Gov't moved EI into general revenue, and bye-bye surplus, so they massively tighted the eligibility requirements to collect. Currently less than 50% of workers who lose their job are eligible to collect. So I guess I should just be greatful that I'm getting benefits at all, aside from the fact that I've paid into it for over 20 years, and this is the first time I've ever needed to collect it. But the reality is that the EI payouts are really small so yes losing three days is a big hit to my budget, those three days is the difference between EI covering my rent and not.

So how come I'm taking trips to AZ? I didn't pay for it. My brother who is in a very high paying job, completely paid for my trip, airfare, hotel, food, everything. He did this so we could see each other as I hadn't seen him in over a year and he knew I hadn't been on a vacation in over 5 years.

As for people who are worse off than me, EI funds would never reach them. Disability payments are provincially funded through provincial taxes, which I pay into.

General welfare payments, which is kind of last resort money, when you've exhausted all other options, that's not enough to live on - the max a single person can collect is $485 / month which will not cover rent and food, is funded through municiple taxes that I also pay. Subsidized housing is also funded through municiple taxes, which is crazy.

About a decade ago we went through a period of governement downloading. The federal government cut transfer payments to the provinces, so the provinces, in order to avoid raising provincial income tax rates, downloaded a bunch of social services onto the municipalities, which I think is totally unfair, as each municipality has a differing tax base. And they can only raise funds by raising property taxes or slapping user fees on services that used to be free.

The social safety net is admittedly marginally better in Canada than in the US, but it's still a massive mess and needs a serious overhaul, but it's not a priority for any level of government. All the governments care about is balancing budgets and cutting taxes.

--splitimage