Can we take a step back from the housing credit and talk about how lame that
Job Retaining Program is. For what it claims to do, it's actually pretty useless.
- $250/yr
- $5000 Lifetime Maximum
- Only covers half your costs when you go to use it
- Allows you to pull from EI for 4 months
What moron came up with this. They literally somehow managed to do something that was just a micron above absolute minimum effort that they could go to the people and say "Look! We are doing something about this!". It is literally useless. Even if you saved it up for 20 years, $5000 would barely cover college tuition today. Let alone 20 years from now after inflation. Especially considering the fact that does anybody seriously believe that with the direction things are going, we are going to be keeping this stupid, flawed paid-for-post-secondary model beyond the next decade?
Quite frankly the only good thing about it is you can pull from EI for 4 months. But woop-de-fucking-do. That alone means you are disqualified from most Student Loan supports in most provinces. And now you'll be saddled with a shit-ton of debt afterwards. This not even to mention that if you didn't earn enough money to pay into EI, or if EI pays you too little, if you straight up don't qualify for other reasons, and the various other pit traps of EI. You are S.O.L.
So, who is this for?
- It's not for the old people being pushed out of a job into early retirement. They have other things in the budget and in current supports to let them deal with early retirement, and will be well into actual retirement before it is useful.
- It's not for young people 18-30 because you would have to wait until you were 28-50 to use the damn thing, and they already have better programs
- It's not for adults 30-50, because again. It takes them 20 years to get a single year of education out of it. And the only reason they would use this is if they were literally being pushed out of their job. In which case, they likely already qualify for EI. And again. They have better programs for education
If anything, all I can think is that its a subsidy for businesses, because now they don't have to pay an extra $250/yr on training their employees, instead "asking" or "hinting to" them to go do x training course.
So I ask again? Who is this for?
This policy is rooted in wanting to help people out from the huge looming Automation crisis we are about to slam head first into with Self-Driving Cars, Full Automation of Menial Labour. It's an amazing, lofty goal. One that needs to be solved before we slam into the wall because otherwise we are looking at riots in the street levels of unemployment. And yet, this policy does nothing to help the very people whose jobs will be taken away from them. Especially since these people are going to be needing full 100% retraining, likely into a completely different field than they one they are currently in. And the program barely pays for 1. Condensed into four months of a multiple year-long training process.
Because of how useless and limited it is, nothing would be better than this. So I ask one final time? Who the fuck is this for?
