Dear Thornhiller,
I am delighted to report to you that our Conservative Government has taken landmark action to take political interference out of the Employment Insurance (EI) program.
As many of you know, the former Liberal Government exploited the contributions of workers and businesses to the EI program. They shamefully raided those contributions in the EI Account for their own political schemes.
The former Liberal government completely decimated the EI Account. As Queens’ University professor Tom Courchene noted in a recent Policy Options article (http://www.irpp.org/po), the Liberals “siphoned off somewhere in the neighbourhood of $5 to $6 billion annually from the EI surplus … the cumulative EI surplus that the Liberals brought into the consolidated revenue fund (CRF) reached a staggering $60 billion.”
While we cannot retroactively reverse nearly a decade of shameful Liberal fiscal mismanagement, we can ensure this will never happen again.
Between 2006 and 2008, our Conservative Government cut the employee EI premium rate from $1.87 to $1.73 per $100 of insurable earnings, bringing premiums to their lowest levels since 1982. In 2009, as part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan, we froze EI premiums at that historically low level for two more years, through the end of 2010, to temporarily shield workers and businesses from the worst of the global economic downturn.
When that freeze is lifted, an independent body, the Canada Employment Insurance Financing Board, will set rates and manage the EI Account to maintain its balance going forward. This Board, created by our Conservative Government through legislation passed by Parliament in 2008, will prevent future governments from setting rates artificially high in order to create a Liberal-style political slush fund. Future premium rate increases or decreases will be the responsibility of this independent Board. However, we have taken steps to ensure there will be no rapid fluctuations by capping any annual increase at 15 cents.
This Board has been endorsed by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business as a “terrific measure, one we had pushed for years and years. Had it been done a decade ago we would be in much better shape … The creation of the board was excellent. It was the right public policy move.”
Our action will ensure that the EI program will be treated like a true insurance plan for Canadian workers.
