Friday July 31, 2020 ~ NATIONAL
EDITORIAL by Mary Brooke ~ West Shore Voice News
The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) is coming to an end soon. The last of six periods for most applicants will happen in August.
Today Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the needs of Canadians who’ve been receiving CERB will not be unaddressed. He outlined a general approach of shifting the responsibility of funding-support delivery back into delivery through the Employment Insurance (EI) program. He gave “assurances’ that people who earn income through the gig economy or contracts would not be forgotten or left out. Details, he said, will come in a few weeks.
Families, workers, business people and just about everyone who required support through the worst of the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic are going to find it difficult to make stable financial plans heading into September, until more details are released.
NDP have highlighted the path:
“Today’s vague announcement of a parallel program doesn’t fix Employment Insurance for those who need it and fails to give Canadians relying on CERB any confidence to know they’ll be able to get the help they need when it expires for millions of people in the coming weeks,” said Canada’s NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh in a statement today July 31.
“Instead of laying out a plan to expand EI, the government has shared no details about what it will take to qualify or even how people can apply,” said Singh.
Singh has spearheaded much of the awareness and harnessed much of the pathway to achievement for Canadians getting the best possible results out of the CERB program to date. In the early days, CERB did not include gig, contract or self-employed people and students were left high and dry as well, until the NDP did the work to articulate the need.
“New Democrats have been saying from the beginning that this crisis has shown what many workers across the country already knew; the Employment Insurance program, as it stands, doesn’t cover all Canadian workers who need to access it,” said Singh today.
Party differentials:
With the NDP articulating the problem clearly, and doing the legislative work — quickly during the early phases of the pandemic in spring 2020 — showed the value of a ‘people’s party’ having influence at the right time and in the right place during an emergency.
The Liberal government (and Trudeau clearly himself) was grateful to accept the ideas that have essentially kept Canadians afloat); it showed a lack of awareness of the lived-reality of millions of Canadians but also a political sensibility to take and run with a good idea when it was offered.
“Successive Liberal and Conservative governments have hijacked the EI premiums of hard-working Canadians to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. This is the perfect opportunity to finally right those wrongs, restore funding that has been cut in the last 20 years, and expand EI for all workers in need,” says Singh.
Timeline challenge, heading into September:
“But many jobs won’t come back by September. If people can’t go back to work, they need to know they’ll still be able to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table for their families.”
The NDP gift to the Liberals, and to Canadians:
“People want to work, says Singh. That might surprise some critics who may believe that people have been just riding the coattails of COVID by receiving the CERB payments. That view doesn’t take into account the shock that impacted families, individuals and workers as well as their employers.
The CERB was a buffer that kept Canada from falling apart during the first six months of COVID. Given how Ottawa politics has lately slid into focussing on the machinations of process and a politicized ethics scandal, it somehow reveals how Trudeau perhaps doesn’t quite realize the miracle he pulled off in saving Canadians from falling hard during March through July.
Together with the NDP guidance about lived-realities of most Canadians, Trudeau and the Liberals didn’t let the battleship fall apart, bolt by bolt. Most people — even with the mental health impacts of living with COVID — have felt held up as best as was possible.
