Hypocrisy at its finest; double-dipping twat scolds Canada's unemployed

Perrin Beatty is the scion of a wealthy Canadian family that made its fortune building everything from farm equipment to water heaters. When I was a youngster freshly kicked out of high school the Beatty plant in Fergus was one of those desperation gigs where you went after your pogey ran out and you really couldn't find anything else.

Beatty rode his family name to a seat in Canada's parliament in 1972. At the time he was the youngest MP ever elected. He held a number of cabinet posts in the Clark, Mulroney and Kim Campbell governments. When he failed in his 1993 re-election campaign he was barely into his forties, and started collecting his generous MP's pension.

Not long after, he was made head of the CBC, a six-figure government sinecure. All along, he was allowed to collect that MP pension that will pay him an estimated 1.5 million dollars by the time he is 75.

After his CBC gig Beatty has held a couple of senior lobbying posts, most recently as head of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

So there he was today, on Rex Murphy's show, explaining to the Canadian people how necessary it is to force through those Employment Insurance "reforms" that the Harperites claim are essential to making Canada more competitive with Mexico and China.

The cheek!

Couple of facts about the pogey system that didn't make it onto the program. Firstly, they've already made it so tough to qualify that at least 40% of unemployed folks will never qualify in the first place, no matter how long or how much they have paid into it.

Secondly, it's hardly the gravy train that it's made out to be. Employment Insurance pays 55% of a workers former wage up to a maximum of $485 a week. And the absolute maximum time you can get payments is 45 weeks, which few unemployed qualify for.

Those tens of thousands of lazy Canadians sitting on sofas waiting for the next pogey check instead of taking a job in the oil sands are a complete fiction.

Finally, over the many years that the Employment Insurance ran annual surpluses, those billions and billions of dollars weren't invested in Canada's workers, they were relabeled as general revenue. The only reason the system runs a deficit today is because the Harper government has reduced what employers and workers have to pay into it.

This is nothing but the time-honored strategy of deliberately creating a crisis and then blaming it on the victims.

It goes hand in hand with the recent revision of "temporary foreign worker" legislation that allows employers to import workers and pay them less than the prevailing wage.

With the Harper government recently signing free trade agreements with Honduras and Colombia, it's important that they create a level playing field, and you can rest assured that playing field will be at the level of Honduras, not the level that we used to think of as Canadian.

Be proud, Canada! We can take on those low wage competitors and work for even less!