Axing EI-Connect threatens ability of students to graduate university, enter workforce

In an interview undertaken by CBC in March 2020, Premier Blaine Higgs lambasted the New Brunswick population’s reliance on federally funded Employment Insurance (EI). “We have a system that’s broken,” Higgs told the press. “Our own people are going home, going on EI, because they qualify.”

“This is an ongoing issue for companies that can’t get workers to work,” he added.

In essence, Higgs was faced with a choice: raise wages and bolster benefits to increase workers’ willingness to re-enter the workforce, or slash social programs to increase the precarity of workers’ lives while coercing them back into a subpar job market. In late June, the Higgs government chose the latter by cutting EI-Connect—a program designed to allow students in higher education to bank work hours logged during summer employment in order to receive EI payments during the school year.

For large business owners and elites, low rates of unemployment present disastrous consequences. Businesses are made to do the unthinkable: raise wages. 

Despite the recent tendency among local politicians to describe the provincial economy as facing a “labour shortage,” such a label is a misnomer. In fact, the province is filled to the brim with students, workers, and families in desperate need of work. Rather, the province is home to a ‘wage shortage’: with inflation having soared to as high as 8.8 percent in June and half of the province’s single persons still relying on annual incomes as low as $20,200 per year, it makes little sense for the everyday New Brunswicker to abandon EI and re-enter the workforce.

Today, many undergraduate students live far from home and without direct aid from their parents. Nathaniel Chamberlain, a graduate from the University of New Brunswick’s business program, used EI-Connect to fund his studies. “Since I lived away from home, my income when out of school went to living expenses,” he explained. “[I] used my student loans to pay tuition.”

“Had I not been able to qualify for government programs [like EI-Connect and the Tuition Access Bursary], I wouldn’t have been able to go to school,” he added.

The loss of EI-Connect will hit those affected by injuries, accidents, disabilities, and impairments the hardest. One woman, a recent graduate from St. Thomas University, was in a severe car accident back in September. Having access to EI-Connect allowed her to continue her studies: “When the money came in, I cried. I felt secure. I felt like I was finally able to focus on my studies.”

“I noticed a clear difference in my grades in the years that I worked versus the years that I was eligible to claim EI,” she added. “In the years I could claim EI, I made the dean’s list.”

Further, access to federal funding allowed students to gain financial freedom in times of distress. “[EI-Connect] saved me from a situation where I was working in the most unorganized place ever, being sexually harassed in the office, overworked, [and] underpaid,” Juliet, a fourth-year student from Concordia, explained.

The sheer magnitude of Canada’s student debt burden constitutes a country-wide crisis. Today, students collectively owe a total of $28 billion. The situation in New Brunswick is similarly dire. In 2005, on the day of their graduation, students with bachelor’s degrees owed an average of $23,100. By 2015, that number had surged to as high as $40,000.

With EI-Connect now scrapped, Janica Johnson—a third-year engineering student at UNB—faces substantial increases in the amount that she expects to owe in student debt. “I am going to graduate with $30,000 in debt instead of debt free as I [had] budgeted for,” she told the Co-op.

While attending to a course load that often exceeds five classes per semester, accompanied by a handful of labs, Johnson is left unable to work during the school year. “I will probably have to take a break from school,” she explained. “[That means] it’ll take me six years to finish a four-year degree.”

Dimitra Bountalas, a third-year student attending the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, agrees. With EI-Connect gone, Bountalas must now “choose between [their] education or rent.”

“I have no idea if I will be able to return to school this year,” Bountalas added.

Lucie Breau, a second-year student at Acadia, is now “rethinking the possibility of finishing [her] degree.”

Higgs’ plan has backfired. Instead of easing students’ burdens, the loss of EI-Connect has made it all the more difficult for students to enter the workforce in a timely manner. In turn, the government’s decision to slash social programs will worsen the viability of New Brunswick’s market economy in the long term, exacerbating supposed labour shortages.

The provincial government’s decision to slash EI-Connect reflects a longstanding trend among all major parties—Liberal, Conservative, or otherwise—to lessen the demand for higher wages while re-establishing the looming threat of unemployment as a grim and punishing fate for Canadians.

It was not always so. Historically, Canadian EI programs provided the overwhelming majority of working (and workless) Canadians with access to much-needed financial support in times of economic crisis. In 1971, for example, 96 percent of unemployed Canadians remained eligible to receive EI benefits when they lost their jobs. By the 1980s, that figure had dropped to 85 percent, and only ten years later, to as low as 41 percent. According to Alvin Finkel, an expert in Canadian social policy, by the new millennium, unemployment insurance resembled little more than “a tax grab meant to deal with government deficits in other programs.”

“Most provincial regimes elected after 1980 subscribed to some version of neoliberal ideology,” he adds.

Neoliberalism thrives by transferring fiscal and social responsibilities away from the state and back toward the working and middle classes. As a result, the advent of the neoliberal market economy—by now an international consensus—has retooled the eager student into a disinterested customer. Alongside country-wide reductions in social spending allocated to childcare, healthcare, and housing, New Brunswick’s gradual abandonment of EI is neither random nor a mere aberration. Instead, by blaming the unemployed for inheriting the misfortune of living in a province with meagre employment opportunities, politicians like Higgs allege that blue-collar workers lack “high-skill” credentials while simultaneously discrediting university graduates for not having yet found a “real job” in the “low-skill” economy. 

Regardless of any given individual’s career path, the results are the same: relative poverty, a reduction in wages, and a life lived with little material comfort, stability, or personal fulfillment. 

Harrison Dressler is a researcher and writer working out of the Human Environments Workshop (HEW) funded by RAVEN. He writes on New Brunswick and Canadian history, labour, politics, and environmental activism.