the flaws of the Canadian model, praised by the French government

In Canada, losing a job in Toronto, in a medium-sized city in British Columbia or in the Canadian Far North, changes the situation for the unemployed. The economic situation of his place of residence determines, in fact, his access to the opening of his rights, the amount of the benefits received and the maximum duration of his compensation.

Each month, the unemployment rate established by the public agency Statistics Canada in each of the 62 economic regions of the country serves as “variable standard of accessibility” : the higher this rate, the better and longer the former employee will be covered; on the other hand, if he resides in a region of full employment, he will have all the difficulties of asserting his rights. He will have to justify at least 700 hours worked during the previous year to benefit from 14 weeks of benefits when the unemployment rate of his place of residence is below the 6% mark, when 420 hours will be enough for him for 32 weeks of compensation when it flies away at more than 16% in its region. A modulation according to the situation of the labor market which seems to inspire the French government of Elisabeth Borne who presented, Wednesday, September 7 in the Council of Ministers, its reform of unemployment insurance to, in particular, respond to the difficulties of recruitment of companies .

This notion of “variable entrance requirement” appeared in the Canadian Unemployment Insurance Scheme – renamed ” Employment Insurance “ in 1996 – in the midst of a neoliberal wave. From the end of the 1980s to 1996, successive federal governments, Conservative and Liberal, adopted reforms that drastically tightened the conditions for access to benefits, with the stated objective of ensuring the financial balance of the system.

“Individual responsibility”

“It is the whole philosophy of this social policy that has been transformed”explains Pierre Tircher, co-author at the Institute for Socio-economic Research and Information (Quebec) of a proposal for reform of the system. “We went from welfare to labor, from a collective responsibility where the State plays the role of economic stabilizer to protect the purchasing power of the workers, to an individual responsibility where those who lose their jobs in a region in full economic vitality are no longer guaranteed against the “risk” for which he nevertheless contributed like everyone else. » Of ” generous “ during the period of the “glorious thirty”, the program became, according to him, “ultra-restrictive” : today it only covers 30% to 40% of the unemployed population.

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