There was no one left to speak for me
by
Robert LaFrance
There has been a certain amount of
controversy about the EI changes that recently passed into law by the
now-famous behemoth known as an Omnibus Bill. That particular method, which the
government calls C-45 and I call a D-11 Caterpillar bulldozer, passed, with
very little debate, about 450 pages of new laws and revisions.
I can say with confidence that this
is the closest I have seen Canada come to being a dictatorship in my nearly six
and a half decades on this orb.
Back to the subject of the EI
changes, one Tory MP said: ‘a year from now we will wonder what all the fuss
was about’, but if you ask Janine Dubrovsky, she can tell you now. Up until the
changes, she was “living the life” on her nearly $300 bi-weekly cheque –
getting some groceries every week, putting up to ten dollars worth of gas into
her 1991 Hyundai every week, and paying her rent with as many as $34 to spare
each month. She was also able to buy several Christmas presents for her two
nieces. Splurging indeed.
The day after the changes came into
effect, Janine received a polite letter from the EI people. She had been laid
off her regular job since October 29 because sales were down etc. and EI wanted
her to take another job – in Minto. “But I can’t take a job in Minto,” she said
to the nice man when she called him in his newly renovated ($12,481 worth of
Ikea) office in Moncton. “That’s a 2-hour drive in the summer. It’s winter and
my car is over two decades old.”
“According to our data, it should
take you fifty-nine minutes to drive from your home to Minto,” the man said.
“That falls under our new criteria. Can you start Monday?”
Janine said that she drove an
Hyundai and not a Cessna and he must have his geography mixed up. She lives
north of Perth-Andover, just south of Portage. She said that not even her
brother Bill, who drives a stock car in the summer, could make Minto in
fifty-nine minutes from her home.
There was a pregnant pause, for two
reasons. The EI man said: “We somehow had the impression that you lived in
Stanley, NB. I do beg your pardon…(a rustling of papers)…would you be able to
report for work in Woodstock Monday morning? Oh, wait! That’s Woodstock,
Ontario…”
The conversation went on for a while
longer, but then Janine said she had to go. I mean she REALLY had to go, like
to the obstetrics department in Perth-Andover. She had THOUGHT she was only eight
and a half months pregnant. Then she remembered that Hotel Dieu no longer has
obstetrics. She would have remembered sooner, but the notice from the hospital
came in the mail and her group box was four miles away.
“My governments in action,” she
muttered, and called her cousin Vinnie whom she would get to drive her to
Waterville, that is downtown metropolitan Waterville where, as everyone knows,
there is ‘a critical mass’ of patients and that’s why they built the hospital
there in the first place.
The EI guy called her cellphone just
as she and Vinnie were leaving. “Good news,” he said, “there aren’t any jobs
within an hour from your home so your EI cheque is okay for a while. Too bad
you don’t live three minutes nearer Waterville; there’s a custodian job there
you could take.”
She refrained from telling him that
she was going to that very place, because he would have debited the amount her
gasoline cost from her next cheque.
*****************************
Those familiar with my column
recognize the preceding as an example of allegory and perhaps not the literal
truth, but it’s close enough for government work.
We all have examples in which the
government – of whatever level – does things that defy not only logic, but
imagination and thought itself.
The federal government’s two omnibus
bills do not, however, fall into those categories. They are first-class
examples of a majority government bulldozing through its agenda – and I do mean
bulldozing.
Bill C-45, the latest of the two and the one that spawned the Idle
No More protests, is a 453-page piece of in-your-face legislation which, if we
all read it carefully (and who has a weekend to spare?) would astonish us with
its changes to the Canadian way of life.
Do you think the First Nations
people – and many non-natives - who stand with protest signs in bitter winter
weather are there for entertainment?
Of course not. Bill C-45 affects us all. It is a piece of legislation that is only the second step in a larger
plan. It's time to start reading.
Remember the old saying: “First they came for the communists and I didn’t
speak out because I wasn’t a communist…Next they came for the socialists and
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist...Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist…Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for
me.”
-END-
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