When someone loses their job, they don’t say “I need to get some employment insurance”, they will say they are “collecting unemployment”, but what’s really in a name?

When we look at the shift that the right wing agenda has caused it isn’t out of the realm of belief to see why a simple name change occurred and what its lasting impact on the rest of Canada and its unemployed citizens is and will continue to be if they don’t fight back.

Employment Insurance by its very name does not make a lot of sense when you look at the logic.  Employment Insurance would mean you are paying a premium on an insurance to stay employed, there is no such thing in Canada because our government, in fact capitalism in general, does not buy into the notion that everyone is entitled to good paying jobs or any job for that matter.  In fact it is quite the opposite, the capitalist system, which most of the world is currently ruled by, thrives on having a certain “bank” of people willing to work for whatever little the corporations will pay them, we know this group as the “unemployed”.

Employment Insurance is an oxymoron and should be renamed, to its original name we might add, as unemployment insurance.  Its name shows us one crystal clear message.  The Conservative party of Canada has absolutely no grasp, or care, about the unemployed in our country.  In fact, it can easily be argued that full employment is something they do not believe in or care to talk about because it would tear at the very fabric of their prescribed philosophy of protecting capitalism.

So to sum up…  Employment Insurance = oxymoron, Unemployment Insurance is a system that you pay into on an ongoing basis to protect you if you ever find yourself out of a job, it’s a safety net or a short term help to get you through a rough patch.  Canadians pay a great deal of money (premiums) into this insurance system and we should all be entitled to use it at our times of greatest need.