MONTREAL—Superimpose Canada’s election map over the country’s employment-challenged areas and what you find is a federal government that is tightening the benefits of seasonal workers from the safe distance of suburban ramparts.
With only a few exceptions, the areas hardest hit by the proposed Conservative changes to the treatment of frequent employment insurance users sit squarely in opposition territory.
That is particularly, but not exclusively, true of Atlantic Canada — a region where the Conservatives hold only two of 11 seats in Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island, and where less affluent ridings of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick tend to be in NDP or Liberal hands.
Northern Ontario (minus Thunder Bay and Sudbury) is Ontario’s EI hot spot. As it happens, the region is dominated by the NDP.
The same is true of the two Windsor ridings that are closest to the epicentre of the province’s struggling auto industry.
That pattern is replicated in Manitoba and British Columbia, where a seasonal employment cycle is most prevalent in northern ridings represented by New Democrats.
Even in Quebec, most of the few seats that the Conservatives hold happen to be in areas of atypically low unemployment.
Minister Maxime Bernier’s Beauce riding, for instance, routinely posts EI claimant figures at half the rate of the rest of the province. So do the two semirural ridings held by Conservatives in the Quebec City area.
The last government to tackle EI was that of Jean Chrétien in the mid-1990s. But to compare the politics of Chrétien and Harper’s reforms is akin to comparing hand-to-hand combat with a remote-controlled missile attack.
In hindsight it could be argued that the Liberals never fully recovered from the wounds they incurred on the EI front.
The introduction of a substantially less generous regime cost Chrétien most of the 19 seats his party lost in the 1997 election. The bulk of those seats — including the ridings of two front-line ministers — were in Atlantic Canada.
The Liberal reform paved the way for the NDP to gain its first foothold in the region. It also made it harder for the Liberals to beat back the Bloc Québécois in francophone Quebec and easier for the New Democrats to benefit from the return of the pendulum to a federalist party a decade and a half later.
By comparison, the political risks attendant to Stephen Harper’s EI reform range from low to non-existent. Looking to the 2015 election, the move is also revealing of the Conservative mindset.
It suggests that, come the next campaign, the Conservatives will be content to leave most of the ground they don’t currently hold to the opposition parties.
That apparently starts with Quebec where the party — at five seats — seems satisfied to stay on a holding pattern.
But that does not mean that the 2015 election would see Harper (or his successor?) play a strictly defensive game.
By all indications, government strategists have a road map that is inspired by the combination of a certainty and an educated guess.
The certainty is the addition of 30 new seats, none of which is expected to be in rural or seasonally sensitive employment areas.
There is no need to look long and hard at this week’s census figures to know that those areas are greying faster than the rest of the country.
As for the educated guess, it is that the Liberals, who have deeper roots in suburban Canada and — in particular — suburban Ontario than the NDP, will still be around to split the opposition vote.
There are of course less-Conservative-friendly variations to this logic.
The Liberals and the NDP could still find a way to avoid turning the next campaign into a mutually destructive battle.
Or, in an alternative scenario, the Liberals could end up softening the Conservatives enough to give an NDP win.
But for the latter to happen, Harper’s EI reform would have to come to be widely seen as just one element in a larger agenda designed to shrink Canada’s social conscience rather than a distant problem in someone else’s backyard.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Chantal Hébert
With only a few exceptions, the areas hardest hit by the proposed Conservative changes to the treatment of frequent employment insurance users sit squarely in opposition territory.
That is particularly, but not exclusively, true of Atlantic Canada — a region where the Conservatives hold only two of 11 seats in Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island, and where less affluent ridings of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick tend to be in NDP or Liberal hands.
Northern Ontario (minus Thunder Bay and Sudbury) is Ontario’s EI hot spot. As it happens, the region is dominated by the NDP.
The same is true of the two Windsor ridings that are closest to the epicentre of the province’s struggling auto industry.
That pattern is replicated in Manitoba and British Columbia, where a seasonal employment cycle is most prevalent in northern ridings represented by New Democrats.
Even in Quebec, most of the few seats that the Conservatives hold happen to be in areas of atypically low unemployment.
Minister Maxime Bernier’s Beauce riding, for instance, routinely posts EI claimant figures at half the rate of the rest of the province. So do the two semirural ridings held by Conservatives in the Quebec City area.
The last government to tackle EI was that of Jean Chrétien in the mid-1990s. But to compare the politics of Chrétien and Harper’s reforms is akin to comparing hand-to-hand combat with a remote-controlled missile attack.
In hindsight it could be argued that the Liberals never fully recovered from the wounds they incurred on the EI front.
The introduction of a substantially less generous regime cost Chrétien most of the 19 seats his party lost in the 1997 election. The bulk of those seats — including the ridings of two front-line ministers — were in Atlantic Canada.
The Liberal reform paved the way for the NDP to gain its first foothold in the region. It also made it harder for the Liberals to beat back the Bloc Québécois in francophone Quebec and easier for the New Democrats to benefit from the return of the pendulum to a federalist party a decade and a half later.
By comparison, the political risks attendant to Stephen Harper’s EI reform range from low to non-existent. Looking to the 2015 election, the move is also revealing of the Conservative mindset.
It suggests that, come the next campaign, the Conservatives will be content to leave most of the ground they don’t currently hold to the opposition parties.
That apparently starts with Quebec where the party — at five seats — seems satisfied to stay on a holding pattern.
But that does not mean that the 2015 election would see Harper (or his successor?) play a strictly defensive game.
By all indications, government strategists have a road map that is inspired by the combination of a certainty and an educated guess.
The certainty is the addition of 30 new seats, none of which is expected to be in rural or seasonally sensitive employment areas.
There is no need to look long and hard at this week’s census figures to know that those areas are greying faster than the rest of the country.
As for the educated guess, it is that the Liberals, who have deeper roots in suburban Canada and — in particular — suburban Ontario than the NDP, will still be around to split the opposition vote.
There are of course less-Conservative-friendly variations to this logic.
The Liberals and the NDP could still find a way to avoid turning the next campaign into a mutually destructive battle.
Or, in an alternative scenario, the Liberals could end up softening the Conservatives enough to give an NDP win.
But for the latter to happen, Harper’s EI reform would have to come to be widely seen as just one element in a larger agenda designed to shrink Canada’s social conscience rather than a distant problem in someone else’s backyard.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Chantal Hébert
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