Stephen Harper and the War on the Unemployed

You don't have to be a weatherman, or an economist, to know that a cold wind is blowing in Harperland, and that a recession could be just around the corner.

So what are the Cons doing? Answer: Planning to cut corporate taxes even more, and taxing our paycheques.

Canadians will see the biggest increase in payroll taxes in a decade next year, according to a Canadian Taxpayers Federation analysis of how many of your dollars will go to federal government coffers.The combined net increase of 4.84 per cent is the highest since 2002.

Even though businesses are just sitting on their money, instead of creating jobs. And if you miraculously manage to qualify for employment insurance, good luck collecting any benefits. 

Hundreds of thousands of unemployed Canadians are waiting for the federal government to process their claims for employment insurance – a queue that newly released documents show has doubled since 2007 as Services Canada reduces its staff.

Many of the unemployed are turning up at Service Canada centres instead and are extremely frustrated. Service Canada workers in a number of cities are reporting receiving threats of violence.

And even if you do receive some benefits they don't last long.

Across the country, he said, less than 40 per cent of unemployed Canadians are drawing benefits from the fund they’re forced to pay into. In Ontario, the figure is less than 30 per cent. As the number of those receiving benefits falls, both the number of unemployed and the number of new claims filed rises...In Ontario, only 159,630 were getting benefits out of 592,700 unemployed workers.

So what are the Cons planning to do? Answer: Cut government departments by ten percent, which along with other job losses in the private sector, will almost certainly tip us into a full blown recession and make the E.I. lines even longer.

And why do they want to make those lines longer? Because the E.I. system is broken, but they've done nothing to fix it, and prepare us for a possible recession.

We have less manoeuvring room today than we did three years ago. Our budget is $30 billion in deficit, our employment insurance account has a $10.4 billion shortfall and we have the highest level of household debt in our history.

If Canada falls back into a recession — or if we’re already in one that hasn’t shown up in the statistics — millions of families will have no cushion.

But why would any Canadian government risk inflicting such suffering on its own people? Answer: Because Stephen Harper believes the unemployed should be shown no mercy... 

"In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance."

Stephen Harper 1997

And because, knowing him, he has probably calculated the more people he can force onto the welfare rolls, the poorer the provinces will be, and the easier it will be to privatize medicare.

Great eh? The chickens vultures have come home to roost.

So what do we say to the cretins who voted for the Harper Cons thinking they were good money managers?

See you at the food bank. Suckers.

Don't forget to take your credit card, or your welfare cheque to the hospital.

And of course, now that you're finally ready to join The Great Canadian Resistance.

Please sing along with John...