Latest / The Missing Middle Podcast / Paying In, Locked Out: Why EI Fails Young People

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Paying In, Locked Out: Why EI Fails Young People · The Missing Middle Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you take that job, you know, for three months that's a little bit rickety, you might have been better off just staying on EI.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: But the point is with EI, the word insurance is doing a lot of work in employment insurance, something you pay into and cannot claim, which really makes it in many situations a tax.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's just wearing a friendlier name.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: There's a line on your pay stub called EI.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: You've probably been paying into it since your first summer job, and you've probably never thought too hard about it, because the entire point of insurance is that you get to ignore it until the day you really need it.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: Today we're talking about what happens when a whole generation goes to make that claim and finds out the policy doesn't cover them, especially during a historic unemployment spike.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Canada's employment insurance system was built for a way of working that has largely stopped existing, and the people falling through the cracks in this policy are overwhelmingly young.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Classonomics, hosted by Sabrina Mado and Mike Moffat.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: Mike, before we get into who EI misses, give us a quick history.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: When was this thing actually built and what did the labor market look like when it was designed?
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so this is uh time for one of uh Professor Mike's famous history lessons, but I promise I'm gonna keep this really short.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So Canada got its first national unemployment insurance all the way back in 1940.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: There was a big rebuild of the program in uh 1996.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, that's when it switched its name from unemployment insurance to employment insurance, and it switched from counting weeks of work to counting hours of work, and there were a bunch of other changes as well.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: EI was built under the assumptions of long job tenures, full-time work is the default, you know, layoffs arriving in waves from factories and resource towns, that kind of thing, and a really clean line between who was an employee and who was a business owner.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the system never really worked well for everyone.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, back in the 1990s, like I had a series of summer jobs.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was paying into EI all the time, and I was never eligible to collect.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that really bothered me uh at the time.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I could understand why young people would be upset by that.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: But nowadays, uh, we have an economy that has a lot more gig work, a lot more blurred lines between who's an employee and who's an independent contractor.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's made all of these gaps even worse.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: So walk me through the mechanics then.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: If I were to lose my job tomorrow, what actually determines whether I qualify?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and like most things in government, it's actually more complicated than it probably should be.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the first thing is it depends on the local unemployment rate in your region.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, in an odd but real way, it's kind of determined by your postal code, like where you live.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: The higher the unemployment rate in a region means the fewer hours you need to qualify.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the range of hours is somewhere between 420 and 700 hours.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you you know cross that hurdle, you clear that bar, you get about 55% of your average insurable weekly earnings, but that's capped at$729 a week uh for a year.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And how many weeks of coverage you get will also run off of your hours and your regional rate, but it'll be anywhere from 14 to 45 weeks of coverage.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: And that seems pretty unfair, but that regional map was drawn around seasonal and resource economies.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: A young worker in Toronto or Calgary is on the wrong side of that line now.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: That was never really drawn with them in mind at all.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: And now the cities with the entry-level jobs are also the cities with the highest rents, and they're also the ones where you need the most hours to qualify.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a double whammy.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: Every dial seems to be set against that same young professional.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: And nobody picks their EI region.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: There's no way to plan around it.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, most people learn the ladder exists only while they're at there on the phone with Service Canada, which is the worst possible moment to find out that you don't qualify.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: And you know that regional design did make sense when unemployment showed up as a regional problem.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: But what we have right now is a national crisis concentrated by age rather than geography.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: So let's put a number on it.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: In a given year, of everybody who is unemployed in Canada, how many actually end up collecting regular EI?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it ends up being fewer than most people assume.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, StatsCan surveys this uh every year.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Latest data is from 2024.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And back then, like an average of 1.4 million Canadians were unemployed at some point in the year.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And once you filter in, like who paid into the EEI system, who had a valid job separation, who had enough hours, or so on, only about half of those folks were actually eligible for regular benefits.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the split by job type is a tell that over 90% of workers who lost a full-time job, they were eligible for EI.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: But for part-time workers, it was just over 40%.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that situation I described, you know, as a student in the 1990s about young workers paying into EI system but being ineligible to collect, that's pretty common because those are your part-time workers, with roughly half of young workers aged 15 to 24 being ineligible to collect anything.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, Sabrina, you've been writing about this job market for a while.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: So if you take those numbers that I quoted and you know, couple them with a youth unemployment rate that's last year was above 14%.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like, like what does that mix look like?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, the dominant framing is still that young people aren't trying hard enough.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but meanwhile, that insurance program they fund has quietly ridden them out of the policy entirely.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: So, stacking those two numbers you gave us, fewer than half of unemployed young people had paid in at all.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: And of the ones who did, only half cleared the hours bar.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: So the share of unemployed young Canadians who can actually collect regular EI lands somewhere around one in five, which is dismal.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so you add the timing on top of that, which is the real insult.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: Youth eligibility has fallen two years running.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: At exactly the same moment, youth unemployment climbed to its highest level since 2010 outside of the pandemic years.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so that net has loosened as more people started falling.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's caused a lot of pain, and it's nowhere in our public policy conversation.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: And this one's visible to people who get hurt by it in a way that a lot of policy failures aren't actually.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's a line item on every pay stub.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: People can see exactly what they paid.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then when they don't qualify, it just adds that insult to injury.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's a whole nother group that gets missed even more completely.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, where do gig workers and contractors sit in all of this?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as we said from the outset, you know, this system was not designed for them, but it is something that the government is aware of.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of like bolted on this kind of uh side EI onto main EI, where self-employed workers can opt in, uh, but only for special benefits.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: So maternity, parental, sickness, caregiving, that kind of thing.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: But regular benefits for lost work are just unavailable at any price.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we're talking about 3 million self-employed workers across Canada.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's a massive population, and about a quarter of that 3 million would be considered in the gig economy.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the gig economy workers obviously skew much younger than the rest of the population.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, what that means is that EI doesn't work nearly as well for the young as it does for the old.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and there's a whole nother layer on top of that where it's even old school to say there's a divide between full-time employed workers and then gig workers, where now you have a lot of young people who might have that full-time job, but a good third of their income comes from having that second gig job or extra contracts, and there's no coverage if they lose that part of their income.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so here's the scenario I keep running into with people my age.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I want you to explain the mechanics to me.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody who works for 10 years pays premiums the entire time, they get laid off, they collect, they then pick up eight months of contract work, and then that ends too.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: What happens to all of those hours they banked?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is something that almost nobody knows about until it happens to them.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it's incredibly complex.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna have to play Professor Mike here a little bit, but it's really important.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the hours that count uh come from your qualifying period.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And this qualifying period is the shorter of two things, either the 52 weeks before your claim or the stretch since your last claim started.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, anything that happened before that window, you know, that eight years before, that's all invisible.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's as if it never existed.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a version of this that is even more common right now that I think is even worse.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say you get laid off, uh, and it takes you six months to find full-time work.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: You get hired, but three months into that new job, it ends.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: You get laid off.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: You rack up about 500 insurable hours on that job, which isn't enough for you to qualify in much of the country.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not going to be getting EI.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you're now out of luck.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're staring down another search that will probably run six months with no floor underneath at all.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: So you're you're getting kind of penalized here that if you take that job, you know, for three months, it's a little bit rickety.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: You might have been better off just staying on EI.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so the program effectively penalizes you for how long your last job search took, uh, which is the one variable you have the least control over and kind of disincentivizes you from taking another job unless that other job looks very, very secure.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's wild, especially in an economy where layoffs um are so unpredictable right now.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a very real scenario that people can be finding another job, and then that job disappears very, very quickly.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: And we know that job searches in general are taking longer and longer these days.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just the unemployment rate for young people that's gone up.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's the long-term unemployment rate, which is unemployment for longer than six months for young people that's also risen really, really quickly.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's the other end of it.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: So, say you do actually qualify, what happens when the benefits simply run out, but maybe you're still looking because of that longer-term unemployment?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a real problem because as we mentioned, uh, those regular benefits run from about 14 to 45 weeks, uh, depending on a number of factors.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: But given the state of the economy, particularly for young people, it can take longer than that to find a job.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it turns out in uh the last year we have data, about a third of claimants used up their entire entitlement uh before finding work.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: So they're basically running at the clock and then not receiving anything.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: And right now, about a quarter of unemployed Canadians have been looking for work for at least 27 weeks, which is up substantially from a couple of years ago.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: But there haven't been any changes to EI in recent years to reflect that it's taking longer for people to find work than it than it used to take.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right, which brings me to the tariff response because Ottawa did move on some EI patches and they moved fast, but every one of those measures looks like it's aimed at a mass layoff like from a factory that's about to happen.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: So, could you walk me through what those measures were?
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: And what about the people who are already out?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think about how trade uncertainty is causing companies, even if they're not laying people off, to pause hiring.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a big impact.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: I've barely seen talk about uh what about all these young people who are already unemployed and now because of the trade war, they're having a much harder time finding work and probably don't have a prospect of finding it in some fields in the near future.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, I I really haven't either.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there have been some uh additional measures and they are real.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that one week unpaid waiting period has been waived uh because of the trade war.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: So that certainly helps.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Severance uh stopped being deducted so you can collect while uh holding on to your severance package, so that's good.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh regional rates were bumped up a point on paper, which lowers the numbers of hours you need.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: So all of those are good things.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: They all help, but they're all kind of at the margin.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: There was a big headline piece that basically dominated all of those, and it was that they added up to 20 extra weeks of EI collection for so-called long-tenured workers.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, who's a long-tenured worker?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, to qualify, you have to have paid at least 30% of the maximum annual premium in seven of the last 10 years, and you have to have collected fewer than 36 weeks of regular benefits in the last three.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: But if you combine those, like what that basically does is excludes almost everybody under the age of 30 or anyone who's suffered sustained job losses recently because they're not going to meet either the length criteria or the under 36 weeks criteria.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: So all of that's a little bit puzzling.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Ottawa ran two full rounds of EI modernization consultations back in 2021 and 2022, you know, looking at the issues that gig workers and others have.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Both of those reports were published, but then there were no major restructurings that follow from that.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we got another round of temporary measures that were designed more for older stable workers and not for younger gig workers.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I'm I feel a little embarrassed here because I'm telling Sabrina things that she already knows and in fact knows better than I do.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I would love you to walk me through the actual politics of this.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why do we keep seeing these quick patches instead of serious reforms?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and especially patches that seem to always favor older voters rather than younger ones.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: Shocking these days, right?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but a patch is cheap and a rebuild is a fight.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what it comes down to.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, temporary measures get announced at a podium, they get some nice headlines, and then they expire on their own, and nobody has to defend them at the next election.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: But rewriting the entrance rules means picking a fight with every region and industry that does well under the current formula, and also a fight between demographics, especially those older voters who um still have a very hard time understanding the realities that face younger workers these days, both in terms of the employment situation and cost of living as well.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, there's still that stigma that persists that if you're unemployed, you're just not looking hard enough and it's your fault, even though that's really not the reality at all.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, ever, but especially these days in this current economy.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: The books make it worse.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: The EI operating account was carrying a deficit of about$17.2 billion at the end of 2025.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: And premiums are set specifically to work that off by 2032.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: So the default setting of the whole system is actually set against widening access.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: And the other issue is the people losing out have no lobby.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, seasonal industries in Atlantic Canada, for example, have decades of organized advocacy behind them.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that shows up in the formula.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, meanwhile, a 24-year-old on rolling contracts has nobody in the room when the regulations get drafted.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of politicians think, hey, that person's not going to vote or donate, anyways.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: So then the pattern repeats.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Every crisis gets its own temporary workaround.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: And each one is another piece of evidence that the permanent program can't do the job.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if we're having to patch it this often, uh, that says it's it's broken at a systemic level.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: But at some point, the workarounds are the system.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd also like to talk about the size of the EI check because I think a lot of people assume EI replaces something you could actually live on.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: But run the math against, let's say, a Toronto rent for me.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if we look again, the maximum you can collect in EI is about$729 a week.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: So if you put that in monthly terms, that's about$3,150.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: But that's considered taxable income.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's$3,150 before tax.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: And when the average asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto is about$2,200, you don't have a lot left over.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, after you've paid your rent, after you've paid the taxes on that$3,100, that's all assuming that you're getting the max.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: So there's really not much left over for food and everything else.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because that 55% replacement rate was set when housing took a much smaller bite out of a paycheck, but that percentage has stayed put.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: The bite hasn't.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's really tough to live off of 55% of your income when people's housing costs are often 40, 45, 50%.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's a big squeeze there, and you really can't make edns meet.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one of the reasons why we've seen a big increase in food bank usage in Toronto.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and costs are rising everywhere, not just housing.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: And that's assuming, you know, even a young person is living on their own.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: They could have a young child.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: We keep talking about why young people don't have families.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what happens if you lose your job?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: How are you going to pay for anything?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: 55% of a wage that already lost the race against housing is 55% of a number that stopped being enough years ago.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: So this formula just assumes that your rent is a manageable slice of your pay.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: And in Toronto and Vancouver, the reality is it's actually more than half of your pay a lot of the time.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: So people organize their whole lives around this.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: You stay in a job, you should leave because a gap in your hours means there's no floor underneath you.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: So a program meant to make the labor market more flexible ends up freezing people in place.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then when a check can't cover the rent, all EI buys you is a slightly slower slide towards the same outcome.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: You lose the apartment in month four instead of month one.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd like to get practical.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: Mike, if you were redesigning this, what actually changes?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: And give me the honest version, including the best arguments against.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a lot of proposals out there.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna choose a few that I've seen that make sense to me.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And none of them are particularly radical, which I know is unusual for me.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not looking to blow up the system here, but there are tiny tweaks we could do.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one is setting a national entrance requirement instead of this regional ladder uh that discriminates, you know, based on where people live.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd set that requirement lower.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if we set it around 360 or 420 hours, more people would qualify, particularly more younger people.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: When you widen that qualifying window, you can make it so that uh, you know, a decade of premiums counts towards something on your your second claim if you have a second claim.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that would be the first area I would look at.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the second one is we we really need to sort of figure out what gig workers are, you know, have a better system of classification, because right now they're kind of neither fish nor foul.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to have a bunch of reforms there to make sure that uh those folks aren't falling into the gaps.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you asked me for honesty, you know, the challenge on those first two things, particularly the first one, is that's gonna cost more money.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you go, okay, well, where does that money come from?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Which gets in my third change.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: We probably have to change how EI is financed.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, right now, EI runs entirely on worker and employer premiums, and is you know, the the fund is carrying a deficit, which means that current premiums have to be used to pay down that deficit.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: The federal government could top up the system through general revenue instead of raising EI premiums, you know, the same way that uh the old age security system is financed 100% through general revenue, we could put a little bit of general revenue into EI.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think that may be necessary because EI premiums right now, they're there are payroll tax.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the risk is that if you make the system more generous, if you make the EI system more generous, you're going to have to raise those premiums.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it may cause young workers not to be hired in the first place simply because employers look at that and go, well, I can't I can't afford those premiums.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I think government is going to have to step in and you know finance some of this EI deficit and not put it all on the backs of young workers.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, those reforms make a lot of sense to me.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what gets me is there are relatively small tweaks that can make a massive difference.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: This doesn't necessarily need to be a like burn it all down and build it up from scratch situation.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I also agree that there needs to still be, you know, robust like protections in place so that people are being verified and that uh we make sure that it doesn't have unintended consequences, like young workers not getting hired or even choosing not to enter the workforce or any sort of like inflationary impacts, which we saw some of with CERB.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: But the point is with EI, the word insurance is doing a lot of work in employment insurance.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's something you pay into and cannot claim, which really makes it in many situations a tax.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's just wearing a friendlier name.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a through line here to everything we cover on the missing middle, a system designed around one generation's working life, still running, still funded by a generation that works entirely differently and gets far less back out of it.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: And the cost when it comes to EI goes past just the money.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, what it erodes is the basic belief that paying in to the system gets you something.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that having good faith in the institutions and the social contract will generally work out fairly in your favor.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that idea holds up a lot of the rest of, again, that social contract I talked about more broadly.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: And young Canadians keep watching it fall on their pay stubs every two weeks.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: So we know the fix is well understood.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, those things you listed have been brought up by others over the years and haven't been acted upon.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: And those two rounds of consultations just a few years ago already told the government what to do.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: What's missing here is anyone willing to spend political capital on people who often don't yet vote in the numbers that would make it worth their while.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is really one of those issues where young people really aren't getting the support that they truly need.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll keep an eye on it, and I hope that politicians do act because there are a lot of young people in a lot of pain right now, and they deserve better from government.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you everyone for watching and listening, and to our producer, Meredith Martin, and editor Sean Foreman.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have any thoughts or questions about the downsides of having a student job in the 1990s, please send us an email to missing middle podcast at gmail.com.