Article content continued

“Reducing premiums and increasing benefits — that’s what the Liberal Party is able to,” boasted the leader. Needless to say, that’s not the whole story.

Premiums will be cut under a Liberal government from the current $1.88 per $100 of insurable earnings to $1.65.

At the same time, the Liberals will invest $500-million in skills training; reduce the waiting period for EI benefits from two weeks to one, at a cost of $700-million; and scrap the changes the Conservatives introduced in 2012, such as requiring workers to take a job within a one-hour commute or at 80 per cent of previous hourly wage levels.

But this is not some kind of political alchemy. Rather, it is taking place against the backdrop of a recovery in the EI.

This pot of cash is officially a “consolidated specific purposes account” — that is, the money paid into it is intended to be used to provide relief for workers who have lost their jobs. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives have played fast and loose with the concept, dipping into surpluses with all the subtlety of a drunk stealing from his child’s piggy bank. The Liberals were by far the most egregious offenders, raiding the EI fund to the tune of about $50-billion in the 1990s.

More recently, the EI account was hard hit by the recession, recording a cumulative deficit of $9.2-billion in 2011. But since then, the fund has recovered and is expected to return to surplus this year.

It was rich of Trudeau to complain about the reduced numbers of people who qualify for EI. Most of the major changes to access, such as increasing the number of hours workers had to accumulate from 400 to 700, were introduced by Liberal governments

Last year, the Conservatives froze premiums at $1.88 per $100 of insurable earnings and in this year’s budget said they would reduce the rate to $1.49 in 2017. The move would save a middle-class worker earning $50,000 about $200 a year and ease the burden on businesses that are obliged to pay 1.4 times workers’ premiums.